Morally Bankrupt Banker

Low interest community loans? I have no money for such foolishness!

"When you need to borrow money the Mob seems like a better deal, I think. 'You don't pay me back I break both yer legs.' Is that all? You won't take my house or wreck my credit rating? Fine, where do I sign?"

— Craig Ferguson

The Morally Bankrupt Banker is unsympathetic, both as a character and to other characters. He's generally in the business of making loans to people who can't easily pay them back, which allows him to make a killing on interest fees and late fees and eventually repossession of the debtor's property. Sometimes he's taking advantage of pre-existing circumstances, like when a group of people get hit with a natural disaster and suddenly find themselves in need of cash. In other cases he himself creates bad circumstances, gleefully handing out loans with Read the Fine Print details making them into Leonine Contracts. In either case, the Morally Bankrupt Banker aims to maximize his own profits and doesn't care if good people get hurt along the way.

He^note (this trope is pretty much Always Male) may be depicted living in lavish luxury, to emphasize his greed and self-centeredness. Alternatively, he may be a miser who has a vast fortune but refuses to spend it on anything, which emphasizes how pointless it is to seek money purely for its own sake. He is not depicted making sound investments to benefit the community; if he uses his money to build anything it will be something objectionable like a casino or a highly polluting factory. ^note (Sometimes he'll aim to build something more generic, like an office building, but in that case, it will be clear that the office is meant to be the headquarters of a corrupt corporation, and building it requires the destruction of granny's cottage or a forest preserve or something else with personal value to decent people.) In these cases, he likely has a model of this awful building in his office somewhere.

Another route is to make him the financier for another villain, loaning out money to build Death Rays and Doomsday Devices despite knowing full well that they'll be used for evil purposes. In this case he may be the manager of a Swiss Bank Account.

Sometimes the Morally Bankrupt Banker is an Obstructive Bureaucrat, Lawful Neutral, and a Rules Lawyer. In other cases, he's gleefully corrupt and thinks nothing of breaking the law whenever he can get away with it. Often overlaps with Corrupt Corporate Executive and sometimes involves being Affably Evil.

Of course Tropes Are Tools and in Real Life bankers can be found across the moral spectrum just like other professions. Sometimes even the most kindhearted bankers must say "No". If someone's asking for a third loan extension, it may be that they've been irresponsible and the banker is not obligated to send good money after bad. A bank that lends out money too easily will soon go bankrupt itself, which means it won't be able to make useful investments to improve the community.

But when this trope is in play, it's more likely that the banker has a small shrine to Ebenezer Scrooge and says "No" because he thinks the debtor is at fault for being poor in the first place and he wouldn't know how to use the money anyway. The Morally Bankrupt Banker tends to have a high opinion of his own financial skills and believes that he deserves his wealth, even if the plot makes it clear that he only uses his skills to make life difficult for everyone around him.

A quick way to gauge how unsympathetic this character is meant to be is his attitude toward money: "That's the bank's money" (unsympathetic), "That's my money" (really unsympathetic) or "That's our customers' money" (run). Another is his reaction when he hears a plea for help. A snide remark about "all the sob stories" he hears is pretty much this trope's Kick the Dog. On the other hand, if he goes out of his way to offer the customer an extension, move around deadlines, extend refinancing offers, or otherwise give the customer at least a chance at paying back a debt or getting a much-needed loan, then he's likely averting this trope and being sympathetic- or possibly feigning niceness and being lenient just for the moment.

This may be a Cyclical Trope; examples became popular during and after The Great Depression in the 1930s, and more recently in the 2008 global recession.

See also Loan Shark and Evil Debt Collector. Expect them to try to get back any money they lend through a Ridiculous Repossession.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• In the Chick Tract "The Contract," Elmer Boggs is one, coldly telling John Freeman (no, not that one) that the bank will repossess his farm. He orders Freeman to get out of the bank and never show his face there again, but Freeman makes a Deal with the Devil and becomes rich. To get back at Boogs he tells the head of the bank that since Boggs told him he could never show his face at the bank again he can't deposit his money, thus Boggs gets fired.

Fan Works

• The Victors Project: One of the corrupt Capitol citizens exposed during the revenge of Finnick Odair is Marcus Aerius, Vice-President of the bank of Pompey, and a backer of a drug cartel. Finnick says that he's put out hits on two hundred people in the last twenty years and then starts reciting names. A few paragraphs later it's mentioned that the Bank of Pompey is under siege by a vengeful crowd... and losing.

Films — Animated

• Cars: Alluded to. Chick Hicks is sponsored by htB, Hostile Takeover Bank, which fits perfectly with his dirty driving methods.
• Mr. Perkins in Despicable Me. Of course, the fact that he turns out to be the father of the primary villain, and therefore arguably the Big Bad, cannot be underestimated. Tellingly, the Bank of Evil where he works was formerly Lehman Brothers and he resembles the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert.
• Disney's The Princess and the Frog has Tiana apply for a loan to start her dream restaurant from two bankers who offhandedly deny her due to her social position (and race, it's strongly implied). By the film's end, her new alligator friend threatens to eat them so they'll give her the loan.
• Rango averts this trope with Mr. Merrimack. He operates a water bank in a desert town going through an especially harsh drought, and is in fact helping his community survive. He was murdered because he found out the villain's scheme and wouldn't cooperate; he found out the mayor was shutting off the water main to force everyone to sell their land, all so he could buy it up and turn to the town into a modern city.

Films — Live-Action

• In American Psycho, pretty much all of the main characters working as investment bankers fit the trope, although the banal greed and callousness of the secondary characters pale in comparison to the violent crimes of the protagonist, Patrick Bateman.
• Assault on Wall Street: Pretty much all of Jim's targets are portrayed as little more than white-collar criminals. Particular mention goes to Jeremy Stancroft, a portfolio manager at a bank who openly defrauded his clients during the financial crash, and when confronted by Jim, unapologetically rants at him about how cheating one's way to the top is necessary in his line of work.
• The Bank: Pretty much every senior executive at Centabank, but especially Simon O'Rielly, the self-proclaimed 'swinging dick'. The board members are not satisfied with O’Reilly’s results as managing director. In the last year, he has closed 1,100 bank branches and sacked one-third of the bank’s employees but the board still wants more growth in profit.
• The Big Short revolves around the corrupt financial system that cratered the economy in 2008. The protagonists meet banker after banker who openly brag about their shady dealings with strangers, some of whom don't even seem to realize that what they're doing is wrong.
• The Brainiacs Dot Com: The main villain is a banker who wanted to liquidate a toy company. He then allowed its owner to borrow money and, to encourage him further, he had someone pretending to be interested in buying toys from his victim to encourage further loans. Then again, his victim made it easier by holding the Idiot Ball.
• Casino Royale (2006) has its Big Bad, Le Chiffre, a criminal banker who handles the finances of terrorists and other major criminals; if that wasn't bad enough, his arrogance makes him confident enough to use the money he is entrusted with to fund short selling schemes.
• Circle: The Rich Guy, per his own description, was actually a normal banker who just loaned money to businesses and entrepreneurs, not some crook. However, when he is forced to participate in the elimination, he turns into a Dirty Coward and for a while leads the effort to kill the Little Girl and Pregnant Lady.
• Cold Turkey: Downplayed and Played for Laughs when the local doctor threatens to foreclose on the hospital unless the doctor joins the anti-smoking pledge. It's a dirty trick, but it is meant to get a $25,000,000 prize that the Dying Town desperately needs.
• The Dark Knight: The Mob Bank at the beginning may be earnest in how they handle their customers' money but since their customers are the mob, their business is immediately both illegal and morally deplorable.
• In Death Rides a Horse, Walcott, the leader of the outlaws, used his ill-gotten gains to found a bank. He's just as corrupt in his banking dealings, planning to rob his own bank when the state transfers one million dollars into it.
• The plot of Drag Me to Hell is kickstarted when Christine makes a tough call and chooses not to extend an evil gypsy's loan a third time. The Fantastic Aesop? Let the gypsy win. Or don't let her take bank loans.
• Fools' Parade: Grindstaff the banker plots to rob and kill some of his biggest depositors (recently released convicts with a nest egg) before they can withdraw their money from his bank, as he needs their money to cover up his embezzling, and Council later says that he's killed four other men for Grindstaff.
• One of the villains in The Godfather Part III is a Swiss banker who bilks Michael Corleone, his rivals and the Vatican Bank out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Naturally, his prognosis isn't good.
• In The International the IBBC is this funding wars in the third world as a means of profiting off the debt. Taken to extremes in that they had assassins on the payroll. Sadly based on the real BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) that was shut down in 1991 by an international law enforcement effort.
• In Invitation to a Gunfighter, Sam Brewster is the town banker who used Weaver's to sway the town's occupants towards his own bigoted prejudices, racism, and corrupt methods, all so that he can gain financial and peremptory control of the town.
• Miss Bitterman, of Bitterman Bank and Development, from It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie. She plans to tear down the Muppet Theater and build a nightclub on the property, pays them a personal visit just to taunt them about it, and actively tries to prevent Fozzie from delivering the money they owe her when the show sells out. This being It's a Wonderful Plot, she was of course inspired by Mr. Potter himself.
• In It's a Wonderful Life, this trope is played straight (Mr. Potter, a Corrupt Corporate Executive running a big bank ^note By the standards of the day, it was big. Probably today it would have been bought out five times by consecutively bigger banks to become part of JP Morgan Chase or something.) and averted (George Bailey, who runs a small, honest savings & loan business trying to help people achieve The American Dream).
• In Kill Ben Lyk, one of the men named Ben Lyk is a mean, smug banker who is hinted to be a psychopath.
• In Mary Poppins, the owners of the bank Mr. Banks works at are willing to basically force a child to part with a shilling to "invest it" against his will. However, by the end, they seriously lighten up after Mr. Dawes Sr. died laughing at the "wooden leg named Smith" joke; his grandson William Weatherall Wilkins plays this straight in the sequel.
• Thad Pierce in No Name on the Bullet, who is afraid that Gant is after him and Earl Stricker for trying to force out their mining partner (who did most of the real work) although he comes across as more regretful and/or pathetic than his associate Stricker does. Luke also seems to think highly of Pierce, saying he's done a lot of good for the town and getting angry and defensive when Gant speculates that he's a thief.
• Nothing but Trouble: The JP fully believes that anyone involved in finance is morally bankrupt, ever since his grandfather made a bad deal with a genuinely corrupt one while he was off fighting in World War 1. And since he's a Hanging Judge, that means death to any "banker" he can get his hands on.
• The opening trap's victims in Saw VI are a pair of bankers who loaned money to people who they knew couldn't pay it back, and proceeded to extract from them every pound of flesh they could with interest on their debt. Jigsaw punishes them by forcing them to give up their own "pound of flesh": whoever cuts off the most of their flesh (measured by the scale they put it on) gets to live, while the other dies from a pair of drills to the brain attached to the helmets they're wearing.
• German drama Schwerkraft, mostly it in form of a Deconstructive Parody. The lead character Frederik Feinermann witnesses a customer shooting himself in front of him, causing him to cross his Moral Event Horizon and this way he becomes a full-fledged Straw Nihilist Morally Bankrupt Banker, who breaks into rich customers' houses.
• Aunt May and Peter Parker had to deal with one in Spider-Man 2, who on top of denying their loan, denies them a coupon for a free toaster. He was shown to be greedy enough to try to steal a coin from the bank when Doc Ock was robbing it. Considering that Sam Raimi directed both Drag Me to Hell and this movie, one has to wonder whether he really doesn't like bankers.
• Henry Gatewood in Stagecoach, who is absconding with money he embezzled, not that this stops him from complaining that Washington D.C. is giving banks too much scrutiny.
• The InterGalactic Banking Clan in Star Wars is Planet of Hats of these.
  • And then we have Hego Damask. He was not part of the Banking Clan, but he was heavily associated with them and even mentored the Clan's current chairman. He was himself more of a freelance financier, who was involved in bankrolling various criminal enterprises. More importantly, he's better known as Darth Plagueis and he planned to take over the galaxy. And the creation and development of the Clone Army until the Republic found it was paid by him and, after his death, his estate.
• In Warrior, Brandon runs into such a banker, whose bad advice led to Brandon's debt growing and a possible foreclosure. To really rub it in, he got his daughter's illness mixed up because of "all the sob stories".
• In Wild Horse Phantom, Clipp Walters, the banker of Piedmont, is using the bank robbery as an excuse to foreclose on all of the local ranches.
• Hilariously inverted in The Wrong Guy. The banker is an honest, humble, and hard-working man who has to contend with greedy farmers trying to turn land into farms.
• The guilty party being framed in Vabank is Kramer, an owner of a bank who regularly swindles his clients out of their deposits.
• In X-Men: First Class, Erik interrogates a Swiss banker whose bank is responsible for storing Nazi Gold, and who knows the location of a high-ranking former Nazi. Oh, and in case you missed it - Erik is Erik Lensherr AKA Magneto. His interrogation begins with ripping out the gold fillings in the man's teeth.
  • Perhaps a Mythology Gag there; part of Magneto's comic backstory was that as a child he was an Auschwitz Sonderkommando - one of the prisoners who was forced on pain of death to strip bodies of anything valuable before placing them in the ovens for cremation. One such thing the Nazis demanded was to yank out gold fillings. It would explain the satisfied look on Erik's face as he does it to the banker.

Literature

• Alas, Babylon has Edgar Quisenberry, who judges everyone by their wealth and has a personal grudge against the main character because of a social slight by his father. He's old, stodgy, and conservative. When the shit hits the fan, he completely misjudges the situation and makes things worse. Then he goes home and faces the future in a calm, rational fashion.
• A Christmas Carol: Ebenezer Scrooge is arguably the Trope Codifier and very much Truth in Television for Victorian England. However, it does require some clarification: the book makes it clear that professionally, you can definitely trust him with your money and he is always acting within the letter of the law, but he still has horrible attitudes about the underprivileged and often exploits them by asking for exuberant amounts of interest for little benefit and pays meager wages to those slaving away for him, all of which is important to point out that within the story and the society is perfectly legal. Character Development pulls him out of it by the end of the book.
• Danglars from The Count of Monte Cristo. Not only does he make stupid investments with his client's money, but when it catches up to him he runs for it with what's left of it. And of course, he wrote the letter that got Dantes imprisoned in the first place. Monte Cristo has him captured by his bandit allies and forced to buy his food with the money he stole. After spending five million francs on grand feasts, he starts eating everything in the cell including his bedding and slowly starves. Monte Cristo lets him out with the last half-million francs, as he'd gained them honestly.
• Inverted in The Dagger and the Coin with Cithrin bel Sarcour. She certainly makes some morally questionable decisions, but she is the heroine of the series and the leader of the resistance to Geder Palliako's wars of conquest. She and one of her fellow bankers use the resources of the bank to help Timzinae refugees escape from occupied Suddapal.
• Mr. Pease in Dolores Claiborne. When Dolores' husband Joe steals the money she was saving for their daughter's education, she pleads with Pease to tell her if Joe's withdrawn it all or has taken it to another account. He didn't have to tell her, and she thought he wouldn't, but guilt over not having called to let her know led him to tell her he had opened a new account in his own name. Against bank confidentiality rules, no less.
• In Harry Potter, the bankers at Gringotts are literally goblins who set deadly traps to guard the money under their care. High-security vaults are guarded by dragons, who are inhumanely trained to expect pain when they hear "Clankers". They'll offer their banking services to anyone who can pay up, even the Death Eaters. The one thing they hate more than someone who skips out on a payment (such as Ludo Bagman, who fled the country to escape the goblins after losing a major bet on the Quidditch World Cup) is a bank robber. Hence the diabolical traps in the bank vault corridors, though to be fair, if they weren't so diabolical, wicked wizards would most likely have too easy of a time using their magic to rob them. On the other hand, the goblins take perhaps a little too much pleasure at the idea of a robber meeting with an unfortunate end...
  Griphook: If anyone but a Gringotts goblin [touched this door], they'd be sucked through the door and trapped in there.
  Harry: How often do you check to see if anyone's inside?
  Griphook: [grinning evilly] About once every ten years.
• Robert Putney Drake from the Illuminatus! trilogy leads a double life as a respectable banker and the supreme ruler of the International Crime Syndicate. He claims to own the United States in a far more real sense than any President has. He's actually presented as slightly sympathetic figure despite of all the atrocities he's committed, and he ends up helping the good guys after some persuasion.
• Poul Anderson parodies the trope in passing in The Makeshift Rocket:
  "Oh, oh," said Herr Syrup, sympathetically, for not even the owners of the Black Sphere Line could be as ruthless as any and all Martian bankers. They positively enjoyed foreclosing. They made a ceremony of it, at which dancing clerks strewed cancelled checks while a chorus of vice presidents sang a litany. "And now business is not so good, vat?"
• In Making Money, the Lavish family which dominates the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork fits, with the exception of Topsy, who was born into the Turvy family and is only a Lavish by marriage.
• Nick Velvet: Nick is employed by one in "The Theft of the Banker's Ashtray". Nick exposes him for defrauding his clients after he attempts to stiff Nick on his fee.
• An arguably sympathetic example of this Trope is the protagonist of the Spanish short story "Para Justicias, El Tiempo" ("For Justices, Time" or "Time Will Give Judgement"): the protagonist, when he was very little, sacrificed all of his money to pay for a circus ticket and was swindled out of his seat by a man (the man convinced the boy that his mother was dying and he had to go see her now, and he arrived to his house to find out otherwise, and when he came back to complain the fact he was Just a Kid means that the circus security bought the man's word over his). The Title Drop occurs because when the boy grew up he became a banker, with an order to foreclose on a farm... which happened to be owned by the man. When the man comes to beg for a little more time to pay, the banker points out his misdeed on the circus (and that he was the kid in question) and denies him the extension because of this.
• In The Premature Burial by Edgar Allan Poe, a young French woman named Victorine La Fourcade is seeing a poor journalist by the name of Julien Bossuet, but her rich family was not having it. She eventually caved to pressure from them, broke up with Julien, and went on to marry a respected and wealthy banker. But the banker mistreated and abused her until she fell ill and (apparently) died. Julien went to her grave to take a lock of her hair to remember her by, and found that she had been Buried Alive! Fortunately for Victorine, Julien had some medical training, and he took her home and nursed her back to health. They eloped to America together and returned to France some 20 years later. The banker recognized Victorine and attempted to legally claim her back, but she refused to go with him, and the case went to court. The court ruled that because of the time that had passed, and the unusual circumstances, her marriage to the banker was dissolved, and she lived Happily Ever After with Julien.
• Played with in A Song of Ice and Fire when it comes to the Iron Bank of Braavos — they're not generally given to predatory lending, but they will hurt any debtor that tries to default on them, whether by their usual method of backing other claimants to the debtors' (suddenly shaky) tile or throne who promise to take over their predecessors' debt... or by calling in, say, every single outstanding Westerosi loan at the same time. For some reason. A certain Queen Regent not only repeatedly defaulted on the crown debt, but directly insulted them quite graphically while doing it too. Oops: instant casus belli.
• The First Law: The banking house of Valint and Balk proves to be the primary mechanism by which Bayaz exerts his despotic will over the world.

Live-Action TV

• The "Bansky" character (no not that Banksy) from 10 O'Clock Live is a parody of the way the public perceived bankers after the economy collapsed and the British government had to bail out banks after they themselves went bankrupt.
• Amanda's, a failed American attempt to remake Fawlty Towers with Bea Arthur in the Basil Fawlty role, included a grasping banker called Clifford Mundy, who was constantly scheming to gain possession of the hotel. He possibly contributed to the failure of the show by making the Amanda character too sympathetic, thereby missing what made Fawlty Towers funny in the first place.
• Barbary Coast: In "Funny Money", banker Emory Van Cleve purchases $100,000 in Counterfeit Cash, which he plans to distribute through his bank while he pockets the equivalent amount of real cash.
• Bates Motel (1987) has Tom Fuller, who zig-zags this trope. At first he does try to give Alex West, the new owner of the titular motel, legitimate business advice, namely to either sell the land to a real estate developer or tear down the motel and rebuild it into a health spa. Once it becomes clear firstly that Alex only inherited the motel on the condition that he keep it as a running motel, and secondly that Alex is more than a little naive, Fuller gives him a huge loan with an unreasonable repayment schedule so that he can foreclose on Alex and sell the land himself... and then tries to scare Alex away by dressing up like the mother of the now-deceased Norman Bates.
• Mr. Drysdale, the manager of the bank in which The Beverly Hillbillies have their money stored. All he cares about is keeping their money in his bank. Undergoes a character arc over the course of the series; he goes from shallow (before meeting the Clampetts, he says he'll get along fine with them because "they're my kind of people — they're loaded") to being charmed by the Clampetts' folksy ways in contrast to his snobbish wife, to devolving back into this trope by the end. In a way it makes sense; by that point, he's reinvested all their money, which makes up the vast majority of his bank's holdings; them trying to pull out would create a one-man run on his bank and ruin him for life.
  • Likewise his rival John Cushing. All he cared about was getting the Clampetts to move their money from Drysdale's bank to his.
• The Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells in the Blackadder II episode "Money" is this in addition to being a Sinister Minister, representing the Bank of the Black Monks of St Herod - "banking with a smile and a stab". His favoured response to debtors faulting on their loan involves a red-hot poker. So favoured, in fact, that he really hates it when people actually pay up.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • In season 1, Wilson Fisk has Leland Owlsley of Silver & Brent handling all his various criminal assets. Owlsley not only manages finances for Fisk's syndicate, but he's also skimming from Fisk and conspires with Madame Gao to attempt to poison Fisk's girlfriend when they think Vanessa has become too much of a distraction. Fisk finds out about his skimming and his role in Vanessa's poisoning and throws him down an elevator shaft.
  • In season 2, while in prison, Fisk uses as an inside advisor Stewart Finney, a mortgage analyst who stole money from his clients and got thrown in Rikers after he double-crossed the brother of an influential justice department figure.
  • In season 3, Owlsley's old duty has been taken over by Red Lion National Bank, who basically are little more than a front that Fisk launders his money through. They trick Foggy's family into committing fraud so Fisk has something to blackmail Foggy with. And the main representative from the bank, Felix Manning, strongarms people for Fisk and functions as a handler for Dex.
• Farscape: Natira from the "Liars, Guns and Money" trilogy runs one of the biggest Shadow Depositories in the galaxy, catering exclusively to criminals and other shady individuals. She has no problem stealing from her clients, leaving traps in their valuables if they displease her and gleefully tortures people caught trying to steal from her.
• Inspector Morse. In "Masonic Mysteries", someone is out to frame Morse and adds a large amount of money to his bank account to make it look like he's corrupt. Morse indignantly asks the bank manager why he didn't find anything strange about this sudden windfall. The manager snobbishly replies, "Well you are a police officer. I was meaning to ask how you wanted to invest it."
• In the Leverage season two premiere "The Beantown Bailout Job", the team discovers that a bank with decades-long ties to the Boston mob is taking advantage of government bailout programs to let the mob take out millions of dollars in bad loans with no consequences. Nate is dumbfounded when he realizes the entire scheme is probably legal, and the mastermind turns out to be not the mob boss but the manager of the bank, who boasts proudly that he's stolen more money in one act than the entire mob did in its entire history.
  Leary: What do you think these guys clear in a year? Stealing cigarettes, selling drugs, a couple hundred thousand, all in? And for that, the government hunts them down like dogs. People like me, we took billions from the banks. Billions. And what did the government do when they finally caught us? They wrote us a giant check and begged us to make it all better.
• Mr. Mooney, Lucy's boss on The Lucy Show, was sometimes portrayed this way, though the fact that he continued to employ Lucy, despite her incompetence, suggests that he did have at least some compassion.
• A mild example in the Merchant Banker Sketch of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The banker is completely baffled by the concept of a charitable contribution, until he realizes that he can write it off on his taxes.
• J.P. Gross, Scooter's uncle who owns the theater on The Muppet Show. Usually an offscreen antagonist who Kermit hates dealing with but slavishly tries to please, his few onscreen appearances confirm it. In one episode he wanted to tear the theater down to build a junkyard, claiming "there's more money in real junk than this junk you got here." He changes his mind about tearing the place down later, claiming it will likely fall down by itself soon enough. Oftentimes, the plot of the show revolves around the demands he has made of Kermit (like having women's wrestling on the show, or having Elton John perform "Benny and the Jets") or a Zany Scheme to make money (like having a robot replace Kermit or selling the oil rights to the theater to the Middle East.)
• One unnamed bank president on Sledge Hammer! was nasty enough to foreclose on a nun's convent, and was pretty rude to customers. (And he wasn't even the antagonist of the episode, meaning Hammer had to defend this guy.)
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "20/20 Vision", the farmer's bank president Cutler orders the newly promoted loan officer Warren Cribbens to foreclose any property with payments outstanding. Cutler knows that a state highway is going to be built in the area and hopes to be able to sell hundreds of acres of land to the government at a huge personal profit. Warren sees the impact that foreclosure will have on Vern Slater using his ability to see the future and offers him a loan. Cutler fires him as the highway is going to pass directly through the Slater property and he has therefore lost a fortune.
• The banker in Wild Boys is a pompous jerkass despised by everyone, including his wife, and who indulges in Sexual Extortion of his female clients.

Music

• "The Complete Banker" by The Divine Comedy provides a scathing commentary on the actions of the higher-ups in the financial sector leading up to the global recession of 2008, and how they largely got away scot-free.
  Can anyone lend me ten billion quid?
  Why d'you look so glum? Was it something I did?
  So I caused a second Great Depression; what can I say?
  I guess I got a bit carried away.
  If I say I'm sorry, will you give me the money?
• "All You Need is Greed" by Shakin Stevens is from the perspective of one welcoming a newcomer to the company:
  Just gimme all you get, I'm a money sucker, feed me debt.
  We're too big to fail so, gentlemen, place your bets.
  The wheel is spinning round and round,
  You'll make a fortune, don't look down.
  Greed is all you need, it's all you need.
• Mitch Benn wrote several songs about the 2008 financial crisis, including "Toddling Along", where a banker admits that:
  We know that if we had the chance,
  We'd probably do it all again,
  Being bad just felt so good until then.

Puppet Shows

• Rachel Bitterman of Bitterman Bank and Development (BBAD) in It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, who is basically a genderflipped Mr Potter from It's a Wonderful Life. She's disgusted by the Muppets' cuteness, and openly gloating about foreclosing on the Muppet Theatre and turning it into a nightclub.

Radio

• On The Coodabeen Champions, this was invoked by regular mail correspondent Barry from the Bush, who hated banks so much that he spelled the suburb of Southbank in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's mail address as "Southb***".
• Our Miss Brooks: The eponymous Mr. Travers in Mr. Travers' Three Acre Lot.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons has the Archdevil Mammon, patron of Greed. His whole shtick is in gathering money, and only loaning it out at the highest cost- very often, his debtor's soul. Much like Scrooge, he never spends any unnecessary money, resulting in his layer appearing dilapidated.

Theatre

• In A Doll's House, Krogstad the money lender comes across as this during his initial appearances but is eventually revealed to be a much more nuanced character under a great deal of stress under his jerkish exterior. He also, in the end, proves himself to be a stronger man than Thorvald in that he's willing to understand and trust the love of his life Linde rather than just viewing her as his "doll".
• Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. Although his character has a very wide variety of interpretations ranging from heartless villain to tragic anti-hero, not even the most sympathetic interpretations about him could deny that he made most of his money by usury and other very shady and exploitative businesses, and that he intends to murder one of his rivals who (while behaving like kind of a dick) didn't pose a mortal danger to him.
• One Royal Command Variety Performance has a Blackadder skit in which Edmund is a senior bank manager giving evidence at an inquiry into the financial crisis, who has hit on the brilliant idea of blaming the customers, using Baldrick as an example of how it's their own fault for being so stupid. And since blaming them all might prove unpopular, he proposes just blaming Baldrick.

Video Games

• A rare female version in Hitman 2 comes in the form of Athena Savalas, the sole target in "The Golden Handshake" DLC mission.
• In Persona 5, Junya Kaneshiro is a mob boss who extorts high school students (usually by having them unwittingly smuggle drugs, then blackmailing their families about it), so his Shadow in the Mental World appears as one of these, who views the citizens of Shibuya as literally walking ATMs.
• Faust Capital of The Secret World is essentially an entire company of this; lore entries imply they've been using supernatural methods of dodging financial crises and screwing over unwanted clients, accountants are conditioned to literally work themselves to death if nobody stops them, and their CEO is none other than Mephistopheles himself. For good measure, all of the reward options offered by Mephistopheles will result in the player getting screwed, pranked, or just bombarded with tests.
• Pantalone from Genshin Impact, the 9th Fatui Harbinger and owner of the Northland Bank. A man obsessed with the idea of "fair exchange", he holds great resentment towards the Gods and is introduced cheerfully recounting how people describe his bank's "true currency" as "blood and tears". He oversees the finances of the villainous Fatui, with numerous business deals in other nations that threaten the stability and peace of the world. Spymaster Yelan once intercepted an illegal shipment and stole the contents, which turned out to be the hide of a now-extinct sacred beast that Pantalone had ordered as a gift for the Tsaritsa.

Web Comics

• Played for laughs in Looking for Group. Cale, desperate for some black-and-white heroism, finds a slaver ship under attack by a kraken. Then he learns that the slaves are bankers being punished for bringing down their entire kingdom.
  Cale: Those people... they're horrible! One of them tried to sell me a castle. An entire castle. How could I afford a castle? How long is their sentence?
  Captain: Twelve years.
  Cale: You can keep them.

Web Video

• A Crap Guide to D&D's video on the Warlock class's pact with their patron:
  Luckily, they're not like bank loans because you can actually pay them off and they're not always inherently evil.

Western Animation

• Archer: Invoked and then subverted in one episode when Pam talks about the time the bank tried to foreclose her father's farm, and then cocks a shotgun.
  Archer: You killed a banker?!
  Pam: What? No, we got a loan modification, you think the bank wants to own a failing dairy farm with obsolete milkers?
• Hurricanes' Big Bad owns, among other things, a finance company. Not much is known about how he manages that venture since it was just briefly mentioned and the episode's plot was about a project developed by the laboratories the finance company foreclosed in that episode.
• An episode of The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper had both an aversion and a straight example. Dr. Harvey takes out a loan with the local bank to pay for Kat's music lessons; the banker here is warm and friendly, and readily gives the loan despite Dr. Harvey's checkered credit history because there's nothing sweeter than a child singing. However, as soon as Dr. Harvey leaves, the local bank is taken over by Pennypincher Banking, whose corrupt CEO immediately forecloses on Whipstaff Manor. He had his comeuppance when the bank's clients decided to withdraw their money from the bank.

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