It's not really a lie. It's just that you're getting a bad deal. And it's not in any of the banks' interests to make it easy for you to get a good deal. You see one side of one trade for one security offered by one bank. Your analysis says it's a pretty good deal, but that's based in part on information the banks themselves have provided, and in general is impoverished next to the information the bank has. So you buy the security. Then you find out that you didn't get a good deal on the security. So you go to another bank, and the same things happens again in a completely different way.
Libertarian free-market types love talking about the power of incentives. However, the incentives in the banking industry do not line up with the creation of an efficient market. This much by now should be painfully obvious.
The incentives also don't line up on the buy side. As a buy-side fixed income investor, you can buy a 10-yr US Treasury (AAA) yielding X%, or you can buy a slice of the 10-yr AAA tranche of the Abacus CDO yielding X+0.50% (made-up but representative numbers). You're suspicious of the long-term performance of Abacus (it's 2007 and you're already hearing rumblings about problems in the housing market) but your bonus is based on the quarterly performance of your portfolio. It's pretty clear what most institutional investors did in this scenario.
Libertarian free-market types love talking about the power of incentives. However, the incentives in the banking industry do not line up with the creation of an efficient market. This much by now should be painfully obvious.