The modern conception is false. Anarchists, Marxists, Nihilists, and Liberals sometimes fall into the same group. It was like a few years back with the “top 1%” protests. These “rebels”, dropouts, punks, and anarchists just want somebody to blame, and so say “banks are bad!” without knowing what a bank is or does. Attacking the banks does nothing. All you’re doing is, really, stealing other people’s money who probably worked their lives, decently and honestly, for that money.
Let’s say somebody, average westerner, works for 20 years at $50,000 per year (being generous). That’s 1 million dollars, before taxes, cars, mortgates, food, etc. So really it’s more like $400,000. An average person saves 401k after a lifetime of blue collar work.
Then a bunch of anarchists say banks are bad, and maybe even rob a bank. Congratulations, you just stole the savings account of some man or woman who worked her ass off, toiled day and night, for that.
Another misconception is “banks own houses”. Not really. If a person, couple, or group take out loans to buy a house, live in that house or flip it, then the bank is responsible for saying yes or no to a line of credit. When people default on their mortgages, it means they lose and the banks lose. Many banks actually lose money on defaults and failed mortgages. It’s easiest and most profitable, for everybody involved, to keep the loan and payments going forward.
That is in part why the big banks got bailed out in 2008 by the federal government. Because the losses were unnecessary, unreasonable, and would cause many other disasters.
Essentially it is a bank’s personal and private fault, blame, for lending out bad loans. Hence this is the “too big to fail” mentality. Some banks did collapse and lose a lot of liquidity though.