But on Wednesday the head of the Financial Services Authority, Martin Wheatley, put virtually every bank employee who ever sat behind a teller's window in the dock.
This development has been in the making ever since the payment protection insurance damn burst. No City trader ever sold PPI. The £10bn or so which the banks are currently refunding to the public was filched in increments so small that they could only have been collected by tens of thousands of individual bank branch employees who looked customers in the eye as they ripped them off one by one.
Whether they were actually aware of the "malversation" in which they were engaged or merely carrying out what seemed the reasonable instructions of their employer is a moot point. It was not the branch employees who denied the efforts of mis-sold customers to collect on their PPI policies, so the failings of the product were not instantly clear to them. (You could as easily excuse City traders who filled bank balance sheets with toxic securities.)
The FSA has launched a consultation on bank incentive schemes enjoyed by branch employees. It's troubled by a lot more than PPI. General insurance, mortgages, "packaged bank accounts", investments - in short anything and everything your bank would like to sell you. Sales of any of these products lead to bonuses which are significant elements in the pay of bank branch staff. Too often, these incentive schemes ignore the interests of the customer, pushing staff to pile up sales regardless of the utility of the product to the customer. He or she piles lousy insurance on top of lousy loans on top of lousy credit cards on top of lousy bank accounts. Unless you are genuinely enjoying free current account banking, it is quite hard to buy an unlousy product from a British bank.
Thirty years ago we would have expected the customer to make an adequate judgement about the utility of the product, and in equal measure we would not have expected the bank even to contemplate selling its customers expensive rubbish. But in a generation two things changed, and washed away the foundations of both expectations.
Thirty years ago, only half the UK adult population had bank accounts, whereas today the figure is almost 100 per cent. A lot of the newly banked half are not intellectually equipped to assess whether the product recommended by the bank does what it says and is priced appropriately. But they did arrive in the banking system - mostly before the banks hit skid row - under the impression that it embodied what used to be known as professional values, and so would not sell them something which might subsequently be revealed as a shameful fraud.
Why banks during that period institutionalised bad behaviour towards their retail customers is less clear. No doubt the increasing opportunity to make it succeed as hordes of guileless customers were ushered into their presence was difficult to resist. Maybe there was some kind of impossible-to-avoid competitive race to the bottom.
Regardless of the causes, the net result is that in an area of the economy which engages virtually everyone, shameless scamming was the natural order of things. It still is. True, some customers are now a less uninformed and more wary, as they behold the banks' badness writ large across the media day after remorseless day, with oh so much more to come out. But that does not resolve the fundamental problem that in everyday banking, badness is deeply engrained and no-one knows how to get rid of it.
Martin Wheatley proposes to deal with this via new guidance on conduct, specifically on how banks' mass incentive schemes. "Controls for inappropriate behaviour by sales staff", runs one heading. "Better business quality monitoring" runs another. I'd say he is an optimist.
Ripping the banking industry up and starting again is not an option. But breaking it into smaller parts is. If the UK retail bank sector had 16 players instead of six, I am sure we and our grandchildren would all be better off. Vis RBS and Lloyds, the government currently controls what would be eight of these 16.
