The financial sector is professional gambling in action
Chris Brady, University of Salford The American journalist and poet Ambrose Bierce wrote in his 1906 satire The Devil’s Dictionary that “the gambling known as business looks with severe disfavour on the business known as gambling”. That phrase has a particular ring of truth about it when one starts to think about the “casino banking” that caused the financial crisis almost ten years ago. But that term was – and still is – a slur on casinos. If the financial services industry was as well-regulated and as well understood as the gambling industry, the financial collapse may have been avoided. At the root of all financial bubbles, scams and scandals is the self-proclaimed “professionalism” of the financial sector – what Nobel Prize-winning economist Freidrick von Hayek referred to as “ the pretence of knowledge ”. Portrait of Friedrich von Hayek. Wikipedia Professionalism and di...