An interesting view of what bankers actually do

It's a commonplace in the public square these days that bankers are the evil ones, designing odd products like a CDS or CDO, to trap the unwary investor into parting with all their worldly wealth. and then there's the occasional expression of a more obviously sensible view, as in this one about Islamic banking:

Many of the instruments Irfan discusses were sold by major banks that saw them as just another opportunity. This is not surprising: Governments and wealthy individuals wanted financing that complied with their religious requirements, and banks gave it to them. Irfan, by contrast, longs for an Islamic finance industry that caters to “small and medium-sized enterprises, retail customers, the man in the street” and offers something “beneficial to everyone, irrespective of creed.”

The actual book is about Islamic financing, a subject we find quite fascinating. For of course the basis of said Islamic financing is an outright denial of something that we hold to be an obvious truth: there's a time value to money. That there is is what leads to there being an interest rate and also to all those other techniques like discounting to get to net present values and so on. We take these to be simply obvious truths about the universe that we humans inhabit and one can, as experiments have, derive the existence of that time value by studying small children. A baby doesn't get the idea of delayed gratification for greater gratification, a three year old will usually grasp the idea of two sweeties tomorrow instead of one now and a 6 year old might go for two in a week for one now. This is an interest rate and it does seem to be innate in human beings.

So, obviously, it could be seen as a little odd that we not only enjoy but thoroughly approve of these various Islamic alternatives. For they all (things like Sukuk bonds and so on) depend upon the absolute rejection of interest, that very thing that we insist is part of the fabric of our reality. The reason we so like Islamic finance is because all of he successful forms of it are actually constructs that, in the face of the religious insistence that there should be no interest, actually operate in a manner to ensure that there is a time value to money and that there is an interest rate, interest which has to be paid.

Which brings us back to what we liked about that description of banking: they bankers are simply providing what their customers want. Seems a more honest trade than many to us, enabling someone to meet their religious obligations while still saving for their old age and the like.