What are banks here for?

As far as you and me are concerned, they're here to provide a safe haven for our money and more money when we need to borrow.
Seems plain and simple so far.
Only we don't own the banks. Shareholders do.
What do they want? More profits, so the banks can pay out bigger dividends on the shares they own.
Up until now, that's meant that while you and me think a bank is a safe haven, the banks want to sell us more and more money so they can make a bigger profit for shareholders.
That appears to have had some rather nasty consequences.
The one consequence we may be didn't foresee was us – through the Government – ending up owning big stakes in the banks. In some cases – Royal Bank of Scotland, for example – we, as taxpayers, are now the controlling shareholder.
This is the main reason why the price of bank shares have been plummeting this week. The investors who bought shares in them for a juicy profit can see that disappearing.
So they're disappearing too, selling off their shares and causing the price to fall.
What do we want out of the banks we now control?
That's a big question. You could say that you want the banks to lend responsibly and look after us – to act like a good shepherd rather than a flash salesman.
Noble as that sounds, it's no way to build a big, successful business with enough oomph to offer a wide range of financially accessible products.
In any case, if all you're after is a conservatively-managed safe haven, it already exists. It's called a building society.
Neither is the good shepherd likely to contribute to the wider growth of the UK economy by helping build a strong, international financial services industry that helps money looking for investment cross borders both ways.
Finally, bank shareholders are not necessarily the fat cats that headlines would have you believe. Huge chunks of shares are owned by pension funds – so if you want a happy retirement, big bank profits may well be in your interests.
When you look at it like this you realise that the future of our banks is not a simple matter of who owns them. Some will argue that leaving them in public ownership for any length of time actually puts a key part of our economic future at long-term risk – politicians and civil servants are bound by a very different set of rules to business executives.
The 'just do it' mentality that is an essential element of the business psyche is simply not part of their world.
Banks have clearly made some appalling mistakes driven by nothing more than greed. But does that mean everything they stood for was wrong?