Joel Tillinghast on financial companies

Financial companies are the jackpot for scam artists who want to get their hands on other people's money.  Clients routinely trust banks and brokers with their assets.  For each $1 billion of equity, most banks hold deposits and borrowings in excess of $10 billion.  An electronic record of a loan or security corresponds to another electronic or paper document, not a physical property.  Even if accountants view the physical collateral supporting a loan, they also need to know the other liens and contractual wording.  Often these documents are confidential.  The combination of opaqueness and other people's money may explain why many of the largest fraud cases involve financnial firms.

~ Joel Tillinghast, Big Money Thinks Small, p. 130

Vlad Tenev on the democratization of finance

What we are witnessing is a massive transformation taking place across financial markets, driven by the intersection of technology, democracy and finance, and one that is ushering in an entirely new era of financial participation and market dynamics.

~ Vlad Tenev, "Robinhood CEO: We're helping those left behind by Wall Street, not hedge funds," USA Today, January 31, 2021

Michael Weeks and Dominik Schönenberger the financial industry and moral decay

Modern man, enthralled by the contrivance of credit growth and the resulting asset price inflation and unconstrained by the notion of scarcity in economic goods, sees the act of investing merely as that of buying something so as to sell later, hopefully at a profit.  As a consequence, in the pursuit of such elusive profit, we witness the rise of a financial industry replete with every form of artifice which, while ostensibly seeking to give us advice, tends to ultimately impoverish us, not merely in terms of money, but, to a greater extent, through the decay of our innate instinct about what is right and wrong.

~ Michael Weeks and Dominik Schönenberger, "In defence of financial anachronism," Edelweiss Journal, May 24, 2018

(Weeks and Schönenberger are protégés of Tony Deden, founder of Edelweiss Holdings.)