It is not just the increased regulation. It’s the lack of trust.
“At what point does this stop?” asked Gary Lynch, the former director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission who has gone on to jobs with many leading Wall Street firms and is now global general counsel at Bank of America. He was referring to the escalation in penalties being levied on banks, culminating in the $13 billion JPMorgan Chase was forced to pay for a series of transgressions.
Speaking at a banking industry conference last month in New York, Mr. Lynch recalled that he had been working at Morgan Stanley in London before he returned to this country in 2011 to join Bank of America. He had thought, he said, that by then — three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off the financial crisis — anger at banks would have declined.
He was wrong: “It was worse.”