Who Is At Fault?

I saw the piece below on the news.com.au website and thought it was worth snipping as a discussion piece.

There is no doubt that banks are arsheloes who for several years (decades) engaged in appalling business practices. These practices were brought to light by the recent Royal Commission and apparently were a complete surprise to the conservative politicians who fought tooth and nail against the setting up of the investigation. I imagine they are sitting at home thinking….well there goes my lucrative board position once I finished sucking at the public teat.

However, the point of this is to ask a simple question. If you are in a precarious financial position and the bank offers you a loan so large and structured in such a way that you have zero chance of paying it off and you take that loan and then find yourself in an even worse financial position. Whose fault is that? Is it the bank for offering the loan without adequate due diligence or is it the borrower’s fault for not refusing it?

Let me offer an analogy. Occasionally there is a glitch in a banks internal systems and someones account is credited with a small fortune which for some reason most people just simply draw out and spend because its an everyday event that your account goes from having $217.36 in it to having $3M. People are often surprised that when the error is noticed they have to pay the money back. Most seem to operate under the logic that its the banks for fault for making a mistake not mine for spending all the money that wasn’t mine in the first place.

I would posit that the central problem here is one of personal responsibility. No doubt the lawyers are overjoyed at the fact that no one ever thinks they are responsible for anything that happens to them.