Big banks can gamble away your money

There were so many excruciatingly painful stories of gamblers gambling away everything and ended in deep trouble, and dragging their families along with them. And both the govt and NGOs are struggling to come up with more rules and regulations to keep the gamblers from trouble. The most notable thing is the self exclusion order, or family members can choose to exclude them with the same order. These are individuals that could do just so much harm to themselves and their loved ones.

What would happen if banks, financial and investment banks were to gamble with high stakes, with the depositor/investor/shareholders’ money? Any mess up means hundreds of thousands of people will be in deep shit. This is exactly the same problem with the ‘too big to fail’ banks in the last financial crisis. The govts had no choice but to rescue them using taxpayers’ money. And hopefully these rascal bankers would have learnt and stay away from high gambling using other people’s money. No, they are back at it, everyone of them.

I am really surprised to read in the BT today what Hsien Loong said about these big time gamblers while in New Zealand. Below are some of his comments:

‘The difficulty is that financial markets have variegated into all kinds of sophisticated activities, products, derivatives, investment activities, trading – and the banks are also in these….But the reality is that the gambling part is intrinsic to the financial system….Noting that central bankers and regulators are under a lot of pressure to split the deposit taking role of banks from the reckless and even morally doubtful part that many argue amounts to gambling with money….These were investment banks, risking their shareholders’ money. But they were all doing similar things, they were all getting sick at the same time and the govt had no choice but to go into it.’

What can I say? And these bankers knowing that the govt cannot do anything about their gambling activities, will go on crazily gambling away with OPM and demanding huge outrageous pay for doing that. And should they lose, they know that the govt will have to bail them out.

What kind of shit are these animals made of? Licensed to gamble and to break banks and destroy the savings of everyone coming into contact with them, having trusted them and putting their money with them? And better still, govts simply dunno what to do with them and cannot control their wild gambling streaks disguised as sophisticated investments!

My goodness, what is happening? No wonder all the banks and SWFs are happily gambling away.