What is the purpose of the financial institutions?

Sir Evelyn de Rothschild writes passionately that “Ethical standards must be restored in finance”, May 9 and we all agree. That should begin though by clarifying what is the purpose of the financial sector since without that ethical standards would indeed be hard to define.

In fact given that the current purpose of the financial institutions seems to be extracting as much profits and bonuses as possible from them, some could even argue that there has been quite a lot of ethical behaving lately.