It need hardly be said that bankers, particularly on trading floors, are overwhelmingly male. This matters. There is much that is comic about the sexualised nature of this male-on-male banter, but it points to a deeper truth about the psychology of organisations. Put a bunch of confident, aggressive men in the same room and reward them for taking risks, and you create a pressure cooker, from which probity and prudence evaporate like steam.
The banking problem is multifaceted: it’s an ethical problem, an incentive problem and a regulation problem. But above all, it’s a problem of having too many over-confident people in the same room.
A group of people high on the same combination of sex, power and risk is bound to make the already very confident feel dangerously invincible, and untethered from any legal or ethical obligation. There was too much confidence on the Barclays trading floor, just as there has been – and somehow continues to be – in the boardroom.