There is a kind of financial capitalism that is pure and heartless and single-mindedly focused on maximizing shareholder value, but you won’t find it at big banks. Partly this is because of the old half-joke that I frequently make around here, which is that big banks are socialist collectives that are run for the benefit of their employees: Compared to normal companies, big banks have a lot of employees who get high and variable pay (and so are basically residual claimants on the earnings of the bank), their senior executives tend to identify more closely with those employees than with the shareholders, and the business of the bank is so hard to understand that shareholders don’t have a lot of control over those senior executives.
But it’s not just the employees. Compared to normal companies, banks have more leverage, so they have to think more carefully about the interests of their creditors than normal companies do. They are more (and more subjectively) regulated, so they have to think more carefully about the demands of their regulators. The proper model for thinking about big universal banks might be that they are both public-private partnerships (with fiduciary-like duties to the central bank and the government) and worker-owned collectives (with fiduciary-like duties, or affinities anyway, to their employees), which can make it much more complicated to figure out, in any particular scenario, whose interests they are looking out for.
