TBH that's actually how it used to work. In that sense, maybe your parents and theirs aren't lying. The ground moved beneath them, however. Banks were never in the business of lending to poor people. Banks lend to people that have money and have a plan to make more money. The more money you have, the easier it is to borrow it.

The current problem isn't the result of banks lending to rich people. If that were the case, we'd have been fucked from the get go. The current problem has to do with what the rich people are doing with the loans these days. The plans that rich people use to have involved building, hiring, and selling products. Now their plans are largely relegated to financial machinations which offered more for less.

The problem that HSBC is having, is that this has been going on for quite some time, and the longer you sell today for tomorrow, the smaller the returns. Now these returns are getting so bad, that they are now reaching parity with the costs of borrowing, as small as they are. Plan B is to pay rich people to borrow the money, but evidence suggests that they'll just use that money to sell today again. Plan C is probably going to be worse.

The rich people haven't changed, but the rules of the game they are playing have. The problem is structural. It looks and feels social, but it's structural. Banks used to give rich people more money, and they used to make more jobs. Now they don't.