“Sir, Brooke Masters’ Top Line column “Prepare for bitter bankers’ chorus of ‘we were right’ ” (March 5) reminds me of the story of the son who killed his parents and, when convicted, asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan. The condition of the biggest global banks today is due to the self-inflicted damage from the 2008 catastrophic financial crash, the ongoing horrid economic conditions resulting from that, and the subsequent actions targeted at preventing such future disasters.”

“Many of those actions (capital, liquidity, etc) required the biggest banks to internalise the costs of their highest-risk activities, rather than getting subsidies or shifting the costs of those risks to taxpayers. Lower profitability from derivatives and bond trading is therefore not a sign of weakness, but evidence that those reforms are working.”

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Read the full Financial Times letter to the editor by Dennis Kelleher here.