Wealth & Money Quote by Laurent Fabius

"Shopkeepers are not bankers" lands like a slap disguised as a reminder of basic math. Coming from Laurent Fabius - a French Socialist who’s spent decades inside the machinery of the state - it’s less about commerce than about power: who gets to set the rules, who gets protected when the rules collapse, and who is expected to swallow the bill with a straight face.

The line is deliberately class-coded. In French political language, the shopkeeper evokes the petit commercant: diligent, tax-paying, visible on the street, and politically convenient to invoke when talking about "real people". The banker, by contrast, is abstracted into spreadsheets, offshore vehicles, and systemic risk - a figure whose mistakes can be reframed as inevitabilities. Fabius is exploiting that contrast to call out a recurring modern alibi: when financial institutions behave recklessly, they ask for public rescue as if they were ordinary businesses caught in bad weather. His point is that banking is structurally different: it is leveraged, interconnected, and capable of detonating the wider economy. Treating it like a corner store is how you end up subsidizing private risk with public money.

The intent is also political discipline. It’s a warning aimed at voters and policymakers tempted by moral equivalence: no, you don’t regulate a bank like you regulate a bakery; no, you don’t let it plead innocence like a shopkeeper after a downturn. The subtext is sharper: if banks want the privileges of exceptionalism, they should accept the constraints of it.