Balance rather than maximization as a goal?

A very interesting post at Harvard Business Review (see here) discusses regulation and profit making in the financial industry.  An interesting point: 

If you let the financial services industry do exactly what it wants, the financial services industry will eventually get itself — and by extension the economy — into staggering amounts of trouble. If you force it to behave, it might just thrive.The question is who that "you" ought to be. Relying on regulators or central bankers doesn't always work because during good times they have a habit of getting caught up in the same idiocy as the financiers do. And so historically, attempts at controlling the industry's bad habits have also involved restricting what different institutions can do, and how they are organized. Sometimes these have been imposed by government — the Glass-Steagall division between commercial banks and investment banks, for example — but often they have arisen organically. Investment banks used to all be partnerships. Savings and insurance institutions were usually organized as mutuals.
In recent decades, though, the trend has been to allow old barriers to fall and encourage the creation of the for-profit, shareholder-owned, boundary crossing financial juggernauts that make up the membership of the Financial Services Roundtable. Which hasn't worked out super well.

Self-regulation or regulation.  But the profit motive taken to extremes does not lead to optimal outcomes in the real world.