Let me begin with a scene that still weighs on me. A man sat beside me in Maktab Sanad, just a few steps away from the courthouse — barely twenty metres from where justice is meant to be delivered. He had lost his job. The bank had filed a case against him because he could no longer pay his monthly instalments.
“It is hard for a man to sit at home with his family and not earn,” he murmured, staring at the ground.
He pointed towards a young girl seated quietly in the corner. “You see her? That is my daughter. We must go to court.” His voice was steady, but broken. Then he added the sentence that captured the entire tragedy:
“Banks never waive instalments. If we fail to pay, we will be jailed.” I listened, unable to offer a single answer. His life had already collapsed — but the bank that accused him stood tall.
Banks possess an extraordinary privilege: they continue to survive while other sectors suffer collapse. During pandemics, recessions, wars and global financial shocks — when factories close, shops empty and livelihoods disappear — banks endure. Their resilience is not a natural miracle, but a deliberate construction of economic philosophy, political protection and societal dependency.
History explains how this system was engineered. After the 1929 crash, when millions lost their jobs and thousands of banks disappeared in chaos, nations learned that when banks fall, societies follow.
John Maynard Keynes became the architect of a new doctrine: economies must be managed, not left to fate.
Governments established tools such as deposit insurance and empowered central banks to act as “lenders of last resort.” Keynes believed that intervention was essential for stability — but he also cautioned that when finance drifts away from human needs, social fabric is endangered. That caution echoes sharply today.
The 2008 financial crisis illustrated how far-removed banks have become from the lives they affect. The collapse was not triggered by drought or war — it was triggered by human greed, reckless lending and speculative profit-making. Yet those responsible were not the ones punished.
Governments injected trillions to rescue banks, while families lost their homes and entrepreneurs lost decades of work.
Thorstein Veblen, the economist who studied the culture of economic elites, would say the banking class protects its position through structure, not contribution — wealth sustained without accountability.
Banks today resemble small empires. In corporate towers, executives collect multimillion-dollar salaries, bonuses and shareholder packages — even in years of declining performance. Yet in the same buildings, ordinary customers stand in line pleading to reverse RO 5 fees deducted from already fragile accounts. Friedrich Hayek once warned that when institutions become overly centralised, those in control reshape society in their image. The banking system stands as evidence of that warning.
The paradox of modern finance is silent but brutal. Depositors hand their money to banks, receiving minimal returns. Banks lend the same money back at interest rates high enough to bind borrowers to decades of repayment. The public fuels the system; the profits fuel the privileged.
Hyman Minsky, known for his Financial Instability Hypothesis, argued that finance expands recklessly in good times and collapses under its own weight when confidence fades. Yet today, collapse is prevented — not for the sake of citizens, but because banks have been institutionalised as “too important to fail.” They are guarded with a devotion that ordinary citizens are never granted.
Behavioural economics reveals another layer. According to Richard Thaler, systems can be designed to “nudge” individuals toward choices they might otherwise avoid.
Banks do this expertly — credit cards presented as lifestyle upgrades, loans marketed as dreams come true, mortgages sold as symbols of success. Debt becomes identity. Repayment becomes destiny. A fresh graduate who borrows to study may spend half a lifetime repaying — while a bank CEO earns more in a single year than the graduate may earn in several decades of honest work.
The Covid-19 pandemic made this inequality visible. Airlines grounded, hotels emptied, tourism froze, restaurants vanished — yet banks continued to function uninterrupted. Not because they are compassionate institutions, but because governments depend on them. Money had to circulate.
Salaries had to be paid. Debt had to continue. Banks are no longer just financial intermediaries — they are structural instruments of political survival.
But it does not have to remain this way. Finance existed long before the banking giants of today, and it can evolve beyond them. Cooperative credit systems in 19th-century Germany empowered communities to lend to themselves. Edo-era Japan used rotating credit circles based on trust, not collateral. During the Islamic Golden Age, trade grew through shared-risk partnerships that aligned profit with responsibility.
Technology creates even more possibilities: blockchain currencies that remove centralised control, peer-to-peer lending platforms where individuals support each other, digital cooperatives where depositors are owners — so profit is not extracted from them but returned to them. Models already exist — public community banks, like the Bank of North Dakota, reinvest profits directly into social development.
Imagine a financial world rooted in dignity. Students repay their education loan only if they gain employment.
A farmer repays after harvest, not under threat of losing his land. Depositors receive fair returns because they are treated as partners. Executives are rewarded only when community well-being rises alongside profits. Finance becomes a facilitator of human aspiration, not a judge of human worth.
To critique banks is not to advocate chaos. It is to question whether an institution built a century ago still serves the society of today. Stability without fairness is not prosperity — it is inequality disguised as order.
Banks do not collapse because the world does not allow them to collapse. But we must ask: should a system that places enormous weight on the weak while cushioning the powerful remain unchallenged? And do we have the imagination to design a financial future that values human life as much as it values balance sheets?
Civilisations have rewritten economic rules before. Monarchies fell.
Empires dissolved. Future generations may look at today’s banks and wonder why society protected institutions more fiercely than it protected the people who lived under them.
Mohammed Anwar Al Balushi
The author works at UTAS
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