Too few resisted.

We all know the old adage:

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Put another way:

In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women. - T. Montana, 1983

Clearly this operates in all walks of life, including business. Including banking. But I agree with this excellent post from Overcoming Bias, that it is not inevitable. The corrupting nature of power can be resisted:

The moral of this story, and the reason for going into the evolutionary explanation, is that you shouldn’t reason as if people who are corrupted by power are evil mutants, whose mutations you do not share.

Evolution is not an infinitely powerful deceiving demon, and our ancestors evolved under conditions of not knowing about evolutionary psychology. The tendency to be corrupted by power can be beaten, I think. The “warp” doesn’t seem on the same level of deeply woven insidiousness as, say, confirmation bias.

In particular, given the many opportunities for making money and building businesses in banking, resisting should be that much easier: you can have your cake and eat it too. Perhaps just not the biggest cake in the world. And whether or not you choose to believe me (I’ll admit to the potential that I may be biased), many good people in the industry did resist. But hewing to the “Law of High School” (that life is a fractal of high school and a few immature jerks can and will ruin it for everyone), those that didn’t were over-represented at the top. And so it is not surprising that ultimately in ended in tears.

So be ambitious. Strive to succeed. But resist. You know you can.

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