Wealth & Money Quote by John Bruton

Calling financiers "lubricating oil" is a politician's masterstroke of domestication: it takes an industry many voters experience as opaque, predatory, or crash-prone and recasts it as humble infrastructure. Oil doesn't get the credit when the engine runs, but everyone blames it when things seize. Bruton is trying to fix the default mood around finance by making it sound necessary, technical, and basically non-ideological.

The intent is persuasion-by-metaphor. "Lubrication" implies friction is the real enemy: inefficiency, sluggish investment, businesses unable to scale. In that frame, the financial sector isn't a rival to the "real economy" but a service layer that keeps it moving. It also smuggles in a moral claim: intermediaries aren't parasites skimming value; they're matchmakers performing a socially useful function.

The subtext is political risk management. By emphasizing the linkage between savers and expanding companies, Bruton chooses the cleanest possible story of finance: patient capital meeting productive enterprise. Missing are the messier realities of speculation, rent-seeking, misaligned incentives, and the tendency of "best terms" to mean "best for whom?" The quote assumes neutral brokers and rational markets, which is precisely the assumption contested after every crisis.

Contextually, this is the language of a center-right European policy world that wants robust capital markets, lighter-touch regulation, and public acceptance of financial modernization. It's not an accident that the metaphor is mechanical rather than moral: it asks citizens to stop judging finance as a character and start treating it as a component.