Banking and Society

One important response to the global financial crisis has been to start a conversation about the need for changes to the regulation of banks and the financial system more generally. In doing so there has been in some quarters a discernable change in the treatment of financial crises, where the impact of such crises is measured by indices beyond traditional economic ones. Whilst macroeconomic data and macroprudential assessment of financial system resilience through stress testing and scenario analysis continue to dominate discourses on regulatory reform, emphasis is also increasingly being placed on socially-focused explorations and analyses of the crisis and its impact. This book is located within a discourse where regulators themselves have castigated ‘socially useless’ banking, and have appropriated this construct to insist that banking must once again become ‘socially useful’.

This book considers banking and its importance as a social institution. The book argues that a strong and stable banking sector is instrumental in securing long-term financial system resilience, a stable economy, and ultimately a more equal and prosperous society. The book investigates banking culture and the criminalization of bankers in the UK offering valuable historical perspectives on the role of banking in the nineteenth century as well as legal and criminological approaches to the issue of in individual banker liability in order to address how banking might become reformed to become socially useful. The book draws together these threads in order to convey how the aftermath of the events of 2007-8 offers a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity for configuring regulatory approaches adequately to reflect the importance of banking as a social utility.