Indeed, the very fact that people began do-it-yourself banking makes it patently clear that they couldn’t do without some kind of financial sector. But what they could do perfectly well without was all the smoke and mirrors, all the risky speculation, the glittering skyscrapers, and the towering bonuses paid out of taxpayers’ pockets. “Maybe, just maybe,” the author and economist Umair Haque conjectures, “banks need people a lot more than people need banks.”11
