They deregulated banks, then banks regulated you

When I was a teenager, I saw a bank advertisement that never left me. An unemployed young man sits in a Midland Bank branch and asks for a current account with a cheque book. The manager pauses, but then agrees. That moment was meant to feel empowering. I remember thinking how impossible that seemed. At the time, young people had little income, no credit history, and no serious standing in the financial world. Bank managers were figures of power in their communities and didn’t hand out trust freely. Credit was scarce, expensive, and tied to proof.

But something changed. Deregulation swept through the financial system and rewrote the rules of access. Suddenly, students could borrow tens of thousands. Homebuyers could borrow five or six times their income. Deposits became optional. The gate was flung open, but it was not a gate of freedom, it was a toll booth that charges more for each step you take. And behind it stood a smiling banker with his hand out.

The message was seductive: you are trusted, you are capable, you are free. What they meant was different: you are profitable, you are naive, you are a commodity. If your future income could be captured in advance, you became valuable to them. Not for what you had, but for what they could extract.

Control by Consent

This was not a gift. It was a shift in power, justified not by consent but by story, told in the language of freedom, repeated in headlines, and accepted as progress. What appeared to be empowerment was, in fact, a quiet transfer of control. Credit became the mechanism by which banks, landlords, and universities could demand more from you because they knew you had access to more. You did not get cheaper education or housing. You got higher prices. You got the same goods at a far greater cost, stretched across a lifetime.

And it worked. If you are under 45, this is probably your story. You borrowed to study, only to graduate into a world where rent eats half your income, or more. You borrowed for a car to reach a job that barely covers the cost of getting there. You saved for a deposit while house prices outpaced your efforts. Even those who played the game well were locked in. Life became a schedule of repayments with no escape clause.

This is what deregulated finance looks like: not a dynamic engine of growth, but a system designed to extract rather than build. It takes your future earnings and repackages them into revenue streams for institutions that give nothing back. Your hopes were converted into payment schedules, your ambitions into predictable returns for creditors. The financial sector then perversely distorted the narrative, casting itself as the creator of value while quietly draining it from those it claimed to serve. What appeared to be support was, in fact, a slow and systematic bleeding of the public.

The Tools Were Rented

We were told that equal access to finance would bring equality of opportunity. That anyone could make it, if given the tools. But the tools were always rented and the rent never stopped.

Behind the language of access lies a deeper truth: it’s not credit that changes your future, it’s ownership. And ownership is still locked behind the gates of wealth. The working class gets flexible finance while the owning class gets compounding returns.

You can see it in housing. When buyers can borrow more, sellers raise prices. As mortgages get bigger, the homes built by developers get smaller. The landlord does not care that you borrowed to pay rent. The lender does not care what you sacrificed to avoid default. Each actor takes their cut, and leaves you with the burden.

You can see it in education. Universities realised that students could borrow more, so they charged more. The justification was quality but the reality was greed. Administrators grew, marketing departments expanded, and students were left with lifelong debts and a degree whose value was devalued by the same institutions that issued it.

You can see it in the language of aspiration. Wealth is about assets rather than security, ownership is now financialised and property is an investment, not a home. Time is monetised, attention is captured, and even your personal data becomes a commodity. Everywhere you turn, the same model reappears: take what people cannot avoid needing, and turn it into a recurring charge.

And this system does not end with banks. It spreads into every corner of life. Landlords, private utilities, and digital platforms all operate on the same logic - don’t produce value, control access to it. Turn the necessities of life into subscription models, call it innovation and celebrate it, from housing and water to transport, electricity, and even access to education.

You Weren’t Careless

The damage isn’t just economic - it’s psychological. You’re told that you failed to plan for your future, that you lived beyond your means. But the truth is more brutal; the means themselves were stolen. Wages stagnated even as productivity rose, social protections were dismantled, and costs were pushed onto individuals alone. The system then offered you the rope to climb, in the form of credit, while cruelly lifting it just out of reach year after year.

The response cannot be modest, because this is not a technical flaw or an accidental imbalance but a system designed to extract. It cannot be repaired with tweaks or training on financial literacy. We must bring an end to the predatory institutions that disguise exploitation as empowerment.

Taxing unearned incomes is one path. Start with land values, monopoly rights, and the artificial scarcities created by institutions that profit from placing toll booths all over the economy, but that alone won’t be enough. Debt must be challenged, not normalised. A modern debt jubilee could offer relief, but without limits, it risks handing a second reward to the same creditors who profited from the debt in the first place. A windfall tax could help recover those gains and prevent the costs from falling once again on the public. Public banking, non-extractive finance, and shared infrastructure can offer foundations that serve people rather than harvest them. The burden must shift, not only from labour to those who hold legal and economic privileges, but from extraction to provision.

Privatised Oversight

But we must also do more. We must break the spell. Stop calling it access when every option is a loan. Stop pretending that the right to borrow is the same as the right to live well. The great irony of financial deregulation is that while it freed the banks from oversight, it placed the lives of debtors under stricter control. As protections for the public were stripped away, oversight didn’t vanish - it was simply privatised. Creditors became the regulators of daily life.

We need to tell the truth. The system did not empower you. It rented you out. It sold you a story of prosperity and wellbeing while building an empire on your repayments.

We were told that more flexible loans would free us from the limits of our low incomes. But if you spend your whole life paying for it, how free were you really?

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya