system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What do people mean when they say that the "banks are screwing us over"? What are the banks around the world doing to screw people over?
gpt
Banks are supposed to hold on to money and to loan money. In exchange for this they invest the money that they hold and give away some of the profits as interest. Meaningful interest from banks disappeared after 9/11 and doesn't' appear to be coming back. So for the longest time, banking money was good for both parties and now it just benefits the banks and not the people as interest is lower than inflation.

The lack of regulation has allowed banks to hold less money (liquidity) and to invest money in more and more risky things (in the search of more and more profit that doesn't get passed along to banking customers via interest). Because there aren't too many banks anymore they account for a huge concentration of our overall wealth (of lower and middle class not America as a whole). So banks holding less money and taking increasingly higher risks, they eventually loose, they've done this a couple of times and a few years ago they lost a fuck ton of money (or really couldn't hide that it was worthless as bad investments and lack of capital caused some banking institutions to fail).

So now they don't have money to keep the lights on, through their own doing, and the us government bails them out so the middle class didn't completely evaporate. This is enough to piss off most people as American's value work and earning quite highly. So people are angry because the banks got a free pass, with out money, that will cost us even more money, and in the mean time they don't have our money and won't loan us any of theirs so we are having trouble making more money.

For all of this trouble, the government throws money at them, they throw money at their executives, and the statute of limitations will be past before anyone mentions any criminal proceedings. 

Banks are all about trust and appearance (you don't give your money to idiots or criminals to be safe) and it's pretty hard to see them as noble institutions when they're not keeping up their side of the bargain. \

Edit: if you're speaking generally, Banks make money by owning and people make money by working.