#1 – Bankers
There could only ever be one number one on this list couldn’t there? These individuals make money simply by moving it around. They might justify their role as being ‘lubricators’ of the economy, but no way will we let them off so lightly. They create money with taps of a keyboard; speculate on financial markets, making profit on the way down as well as up; create asset bubbles that can destabilise whole economies; mis-sell insurance and investment products; create and sell financial instruments that are not linked to any real value and perhaps worst of all, have become ‘too big to fail’ so that they are bailed out by tax payers when it all goes wrong.
Yes, it’s fair to say bankers are the most hated profession in the world.