The banking industry has evolved into was an army of megabanks, such as Citigroup and JP Morgan. They have employees numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and a bureaucracy in place to manage their diverse businesses, which spanned the entire globe.

With so many employees and businesses, it was hard for many of the people working inside to feel any real sense of ownership of the firm.

The result? Investment banks turned into a loose confederation united not by the understanding that their risk was jointly owned, but by a common source of cheap money: bank deposits and government-subsidized debt. One Man’s View