Clearly you're angry, but the post you're replying to has a point. There is a tendency for countries to shed manufacturing and move into other sectors, and it's often a sign of success rather than decline.
When there's a major economic event, all of the other competing philosophies zoom out of the desert seeking followers like Small Gods. The risk is that if you get driven by your anger rather than your mind, you'll find yourself in the arms of a new bizareness, rather than something better.
Not angry in the least. Just very cynical of suggestions banking is better than more industrial sectors. Besides it's not like Detroit or Sheffield could reinvent themselves as a banking centre without extreme subsidies to encourage mass relocations. Money neither has.
Even for ROI you'd have to go back a very long way to do worse than RBS, and will probably be sitting on that loss for another decade or more.
Banking does have several advantages - get big enough and the taxpayer will bail you out. So the downside becomes an externality. That is not good for encouraging ethics. Also through the miracle of fiat money and fractional reserve banking you get to print your own!
You have to wonder therefore how they manage to make such a bloody mess of it so often. Oh of course - greed and total lack of adequate regulation.
When there's a major economic event, all of the other competing philosophies zoom out of the desert seeking followers like Small Gods. The risk is that if you get driven by your anger rather than your mind, you'll find yourself in the arms of a new bizareness, rather than something better.