Four counter-intuitive words give you a banker, female, with a startling weakness for wealth redistribution, and an emblematic tale for our times. Emblematic and weird, that is.

In fiddling the books, rural branch manager Erika Schmidt didn’t do anything that has not been done a thousand times before. Like most frauds, the 62-year-old German now says that she didn’t know what came over her. Between 2003 and 2005, nevertheless, she “borrowed” £7 million from rich sorts who had not touched their accounts in years just to aid poor folk “drowning in debt”. She believes – the weird part – that she was suffering from “helper syndrome”, poor woman.

You can see her problem. If the last year and a half has taught us anything, it is that the sane and responsible types who run banking regard altruism as a dangerous disease. Helping people (or countries) into debt is part of the job. Helping them out again is someone else’s business. The idea that money should ever move from those who have it to those who need it – short of a government bail-out for a certain crucial industry, of course – is positively subversive.

So the question needs to be asked: does Alistair Darling suffer from helper syndrome? Consider the evidence. Last winter, like some secret Santa, he passed £62 billion of other people’s money – your money, as it happens – to indigent Royal Bank of Scotland and stony broke HBOS without telling a soul. In fact, the Chancellor and the Bank of England failed even to mention the sub to shareholders who were being asked to stump up billions in rights issues for those perfectly sound banks. Mr Darling didn’t want anyone to panic, you see.

The important thing about a crisis of capitalism, apart from those told-you-so moments, is the challenge it offers to ideas of democracy. Let’s say, for example – for it happens to be true – that between them Britain, America and Europe spent $14 trillion simply to prevent the banking system from winding up as a small brown stain on the carpet. According to people who claim to understand such things, the sum is equivalent to one quarter of the entire planet’s GDP.

So was there a show of hands? Did I blink and miss the vote? Most of us are likely to live straitened lives for a long time to come as a result of the decisions taken over the past 18 months. Taxes will go up, services will be cut, infrastructure will be neglected, millions will be destroyed by unemployment and millions more will sicken and die, especially in the developing world. Yet there was no debate, no consultation, not even a show of transparency. We were informed, merely, that there was no choice. Banking could not be allowed to fail.

So decisions that will define a generation were made without even an attempt to manufacture consent: how does that count as democracy? And since we are on the subject, how can a society be said to function according to a democratic ideal when banking behaves like some giant, ravenous cuckoo in the nest? The same answer: no choice.

What do we know about banking? First, that it is utterly indifferent to the popular will. Has contempt shamed bankers into changing their ways? Not remotely. Sir David Walker – a banker investigates bankers: brilliant – produces a hilarious report. In it he suggests, no more, that top City firms might care to put a figure on the number of their employees earning more than £1m annually. This is his idea of a threat.

Sir David doesn’t want such people – “possibly thousands” of them, he says – to be named, nor does he even consider the idea of pay restraint. He doesn’t appear to know how to force them to behave rationally in business, beyond setting up “risk committees” like the committee that didn’t save Northern Rock. He can’t tell us how to make bank chairmen and non-executive directors do their jobs properly, beyond hinting that it would be a jolly good idea. And he cannot conceive why his burlesque of “regulation” just isn’t funny.

Sorry, scrub that. There are some, “possibly thousands”, who will find it funny. Even now they are – for I can no longer resist the cliche – laughing all the way back to the banks, there to await their Christmas bonuses. At Goldman Sachs the average – that’s average – pay-out is expected to top £320,000. Many will spray noughts like festive tinsel on the end of the fat figure.

But what business is it of yours or mine? This is private enterprise “creating wealth”, is it not? I have a Herr Marx on the line. He says: pull the other one. Take Sir David’s million-pound mob. By one estimate, fully 200 of those belong to one bank. You may have heard of it. And since you own the Royal Bank of Scotland, you should try to connect a state-dependent basket case with the institution paying £1m salaries (and then some) to 200 lucky individuals.

As for the competitors of RBS who claim to have survived the crash intact, let’s kill that myth. They endure only because the banking system endures, and the system still stands only because of the “implicit guarantee” offered by the world’s governments. That guarantee depends, $14 trillion and all, on the common folk who will be paying down fantastic deficits for decades. Feudalism was more sophisticated.

Still, it’s not all bad news. In fact, in some quarters the news is excellent. Because governments have had to borrow hugely, the bond markets have been buzzing again. With the competition thinned out, and with returns guaranteed, banks are making a killing.

That’s worth repeating: bankers are earning giant bonuses again because governments have had to borrow in order to keep bankers in business. Now, what was I saying about democracy?

Banking has become a kind of inoperable tumour in the body politic. Try to remove it, try just to shrink it, and the body will die. That’s what they say and bankers are, as it were, banking on you believing it. The crisis has demonstrated a singular truth: capitalism does not serve society; modern society is in thrall, utterly, to its economic mechanisms. Is it any wonder, then, that bankers are arrogant, greedy, or oblivious to moral sanctions? Is it any wonder that they are returning to business as usual? Who will stop them?

Hence my argument: banking as a source of unchallenged power is a threat to democracy itself. Are ordinary people “crying out for credit”? Tough. Are politicians whining about the return of the bonus culture? Tough. Did someone say that the banks should be cut down to size, or at least made to acknowledge their colossal debt to the public realm? Tough. For all their posturing, Wall Street and the City have the hubris of hoodlums. They say: What are you going to do about it?

No answer comes. Labour buys half the British banking system on our behalf and says it has no wish to be in the banking business. Why? Because it might be possible to do a worse job than all those glossy bankers? Or because – the real answer – the City, that rotten borough, wouldn’t like it?

Chris Kyle, who is something at Lloyds, said last week that he didn’t see “why the banks are being singled out”. He could see well enough when his bank took truckloads of public money. Perhaps he can see better now that the Supreme Court has endorsed the banks’ right, unparalleled in any sphere of business, to levy fines (“charges”) on customers who misbehave, and to help themselves to pay packets as they please. That was once the prerogative of the state.

Though they will not admit it, the crisis has been a Godsend for the banks. Now they have all the proof they ever needed. “Too big to fail” means too big to challenge. A living democracy would have a three-fold answer to that. It would bind with legislation, tax in the name of equity, and then take real ownership.

Or is that my helper syndrome talking?