The news about the poor jobs report for March (125,000) has some experts concerned about the future of growth. Will it slow down? Are we heading toward the next crisis? Such fears are meaningful because the system that collapsed in 2008 is the exact same system we have today. And what this system depends on more than anything is universal confidence in the system. As the post-Keynesian economist Ha-Joon Chang explains in his last book, Economics: The User's Guide, banks depend entirely on our belief in them. If everyone thinks their money is in the bank, then it is for sure there. But if everyone thinks it isn't, then it is not there—this is called a bank run.

And what is true for banks is true for the entire financial sector. When investors do not believe in it, they all do all they can to go liquid, to transform their investments into hard cash or what amounts to the same thing, low-yield government bonds. (Cash and T-Bills are backed by the state.)

The question, then, that this state of affairs must bring to mind is: Why do we have banks and other financial institutions in the first place? Is not a bank that is too big to fail the same as a nationalized bank? Isn't that exactly what Too Big to Fail finally means? Yes, it is. And to make matters more absurd, banks mostly deal with other banks or invest in assets such as property. The bulk of their business is not in the real economy (read the banking section in Martin Wolf's new book The Shifts and the Shocks). And so the primary innovations generated by the financial sector (derivatives of all kinds) rarely benefit society even indirectly. And the secondary innovations usually involve automation, reducing human interaction to a bare minimum—in short, cutting costs. In this regard, the new Chase branch on Madison is at the vanguard of what the industry surely sees as progress/futuristic.

Here, the ATM has pretty much become the whole branch. The days of being locked outside in the cold or the rain will soon be over for this kind of technology. When you enter 1200 Madison Street, you will find not one human teller, but one human minder of the machines. And so, the banks of the future (which we are now in) enjoy the safety of nationalization but expose their employees and average customers to the ruthless laws of the market jungle. The absurdity of this situation can only end by providing a public option for banking. There is no reason why, for example, the post office should not provide this service.

One more point: The only advantage I could imagine coming out of the ATMization of the Madison branch is that the bank robber will now have to go to school to learn code. (You can't hold up these new machines.) But going to school means going into debt. In other words, it means getting ripped off by the bank.