I flippantly thought, from the first time about when I was reading about dark pools in the financial times newspaper, the delay in reporting less interesting than I hadn't expected the reporting, I have felt as if the bankers were unravelling their own life support and ecosystem, without realising what they are doing. Dark pools existed for advancing business in a grey area of regulatory distinction. This is the habituated purpose of the modern banker. The most important exposition of the expansion of banks into grey area meaning uncertain legal ground in which crucially the advantage of any interpretation and codification by case law, is strongly to the advantage of who can deploy the greater resources, must be "Wriston" the biography of Walter Wriston, who created the modern Citibank from the National City Bank of New York. Precisely by expansion in grey areas of business.
But the ad absurdam finality of creating ever more custom trading venues, is that you inevitably end up only being able to game yourself. The professional advantage of executing in a public market is replaced by the mind rotting process of writing your own rules and looking for where you can faithfully attest you weren't developing a rule for suitability for your trading desk abilities, you either accept you know that your own rules are already beaten by your own operations and become at best a pragmatist, of you devolve into second guessing the nature of your own company to be able to claim your rules are unbiased neutral and blind to be fair to all comers.
This has turned banks into navel gazers not Watchmen over economic instability and guards of our capacity of production in daily life and ready in case of war. The regulation was wanted by banks to assure the public. This move to reliance on in house mechanisms for all of your flow, eliminate the advantage of regulation. This erodes the raisin detre of regulatory government but it far worse dissolves the conveyance of trust from government institution that the regulated bank enjoys.
I am saying that one day I realised that the behaviour of banks had become self destructive and it wasn't a flu or affliction but a inherent character trait come out of much poorly understood history I think is too important to never let the public see. We need the institutions to function, too.