There may be something to the latter thought. What, after all, does finance do? It exists to reduce the cost of finding faraway investment, and thus increase the average distance between a debtor and a creditor. In a world with globalised finance, you don’t rely on your village moneylender: you choose from several banks who’ll repackage your loan to sell to hedge funds halfway across the world. This reduces the cost of capital; but the moral pressure associated with closeness — in which the debtor knew the cost to the creditor of not repaying him, the creditor understood the difficulties facing the debtor — are lost.

Of course, this has happened throughout the economy as its complexity has increased. That’s a good thing, even if it has troubled many throughout the ages. Marx wasn’t happy that “productive relations” in a cash economy were intangible. (“All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy; avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.”) Even Alain de Botton worries that work today isn’t connected to its outcome, and that we don’t know where the things we buy are from — and thus that there is little poetry about workplaces or tools today. Few, he says, have written poems about fridges, for example. (Though many, I’d say, have used magnets to write poems on fridges.)

But finance is different from any of this. As Margaret Atwood pointed out after the credit crisis hit, “in Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke, the word for ‘debt’ and the word for ‘sin’ are the same.” And financiers have been the target of populist anger throughout history — not just because of their wealth, but because their wealth has always struck the mob as being less rooted, more mobile, more dangerous. And if finance has always been different, what hope of marrying morality and financial markets?

... contd.