But business people, especially those at or near the top of the financial or wealth tree, need to realise the reponsibility they have to ensure a moral, accessible economic system that allows those in the poorer sections of society to aspire to better lives, to be able to do worthwhile work.
Instead, we can clearly see in the BBC article below how banks abuse their powerful place in society by an overt focus on profit at the expense of the society + customers they are supposed to serve.
It is crystal clear they primarily serve their own self-interest, their 'pure profit' over anything moral + human.
Here's the article - I've bold-ed the parts showing what a poor role model banks are compared to law-abiding, honest families and other people.
Looks like FSA leader Hector Sants is a man for the people - he seems like he can smell dodgy businessmen + right bankers (just as bad as knife crime stabbers in some ways)
Banks warned of economic worries
Banks should make plans based on the assumption the economic downturn could be as bad for them as the recession in the 1990s, the City watchdog has said.
The warning from FSA chief executive Hector Sants comes a year after the credit crunch officially began.
Mr Sants also told the BBC he had put pressure on most of the UK's big banks to raise billions in new capital.
That was so they would be robust enough to withstand the potentially severe financial pressures ahead, he said.
Pressure to raise capital
The recession and property market downturn of the early 1990s saw British banks suffer debilitating losses over an extended period.
On Friday it was reported that repossessions had risen sharply and that one bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, had posted the second-biggest loss in UK banking history.
In an interview with BBC business editor Robert Peston, Mr Sants was asked whether the difficulties for banks could be as bad as they were in the early 1990s, and whether losses on lending would continue to be a problem for up to three years.
He replied that he would expect banks "to plan on that type of assumption".
He said he had expressed his opinions "fairly forcibly" to banks that they needed to raise capital, so that they could be confident of weathering the economic downturn.
Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HBOS have between them raised GBP20bn of new equity capital.
The credit crunch began when banks stopped lending to one another, and to their customers, in vastly reduced quantity to previous years.
This was because for years they had been raising funds to lend to us by selling bonds backed by risky US home loans given to borrowers on low incomes or with poor credit records.
As interest rates in the US rose and these borrowers began to default in record numbers, "the world's investors worked out that sub-prime wasn't pure gold but something a lot nastier and smellier than that", our correspondent said.
"Suddenly the collateral the banks had been offering was not very valuable - in fact many people thought almost valueless, which made it that much harder for banks to raise money," he added.
Bank bonuses blamed
Mr Sants said part of the cause of the economic mess was that bankers had been rewarded for taking foolish risks.
And he warned that if banks continued to reward their employees for doing dangerous deals, the watchdog would make sure that banks and their shareholders would be penalised.
He said there would be "consequences" for banks that pay employees too much for doing imprudent deals.
He also said in future banks must give greater consideration to the
downside of the risks they take and make provisions for that to
prevent a situation like the current crisis from being repeated.
To make sure banks are less likely to violently react in a downturn, Mr Sants warned consumers would have to accept less access to credit in the boom times.
"We want to create an environment where the right amount of credit is available to consumers, but not too much," he added.
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Very interesting to see that it's not just me seeing how greedy bankers and business is causing major misery, knife crime, poverty - and quite frankly - devastation. Here's a couple of experts speaking out to the BBC (visit this link for more). It isn't right and the taxpayer (us!!) is picking up the bill for their excesses. I'm about to investigate joining that group - the Taxpayers Alliance - if they put up candidates for Parliament, I'll probably vote for them too:
BLAME THOSE CLEVER BANKERS
Professor Peter Morici of the University of Maryland has been an adviser to the US Congress and government.
Wizardry. Alchemy. Lead into gold. Are these the playthings only of medieval fools?
The credit crunch tells us perhaps not. The Holy Grail of medieval science was to find the formula to turn lead into gold.
And why not? Wealth without work. Everyone was for that, but we modern folks know better. Or do we?
Today, globalisation is driving down profit margins in making everything, from steel to software. If you make a profit, soon someone in China will make it begone.
But deal-making, putting companies together and taking them apart, financing it all, offers great rewards.
Then there are the risks. Making risks evaporate in the morning sun, or the shadows of Wall Street, seems to be where the wealth lies.
Enter our financial engineers. They don't deal in metals or megabytes, they deal in companies that make them.
Combining them, financing them, taking them apart, putting them together again. That's the stuff of modern fortunes.
But what of those risks? The engineers that assemble these deals say all the risks can be laid off on other engineers and their clients.
And by investing in each other, everyone's money will be safe. Profits without risk.
They even thought they could do that with sub-prime mortgages - home loans to people who really couldn't afford them.
They bought each other's debt and erased one another's risk by dealing with one another in a giant chain letter. Until someone realised that what they were trading wasn't worth a hill of beans.
The house of cards has collapsed, but were these guys the fools? Or do true wizards live on Wall Street?
Perhaps they do, because the engineers have escaped with their big paydays and bonuses, and central banks like the Federal Reserve and Bank of England are underwriting the tab to foist the bill on all of us - the taxpayers.
Who are the fools here? Perhaps you and me. The engineers have turned worthless paper into personal fortunes by sticking us with the tab.
BLAME THOSE GREEDY BANKERS
Robert Reich, of the University of California at Berkeley, is a former US labour secretary.
Some greed is necessary to keep capitalism going. But too much greed will bring it down.
Even Adam Smith, the father of economics, understood that capitalism requires some degree of trust.
Yet the greed that's taken over our banking system is undermining the trust of investors, who are necessary if there's going to be any money in the banking system to invest.
Here in America, the authorities are now chasing down investment bankers who recommended their giant hedge funds to investors, even when the bankers knew the funds were about to implode.
Greedy bankers like them have been running a giant con-game. They figure if they can persuade investors to buy something that's actually worth nothing, it might appear to be worth something, which lets them persuade others to buy even more, because - after all - by this time lots of investors are buying it.
And then when the bubble bursts and investors lose their shirts, the bankers keep their fat commissions and a percentage of the upside gains.
But what they've left out of the calculation is the trust needed next time a banker claims something's a good deal.
You see, trust is a precious commodity. And it's eroding fast - which is why the credit crunch continues.
Now, we've been here before: the late 1920s and an anything-goes banking system filled with bankers ready to sell securities to the biggest sucker to come along next.
Wealth then was as concentrated as it is today; debt piling up as high as it is today; greed as rampant as it is today.
And then what happened? The bubble of all bubbles burst on 21 October 1929, ushering in the Great Depression.
Franklin D Roosevelt told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself. But the fact was, the financial system had let them down - and they wouldn't trust it again for decades.
Greedy bankers beware.
So if you work for a bank and see bankers being rewarded for dangerous deals, report it to the FSA. Or better still ring Crimestoppers - let's get these greedy business people making life worse for the rest of us, and helping cause inner city deprivation - and knife crime.
They may not hold the knife but they are at least partly responsible for the reasons why crime happens and blades are in people's pockets. Bankers.
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