Answer by Peter Jones:
Depends.
🙂
On their individual behaviour.
Not all capitalists are bad, but what we desperately need is greater transparency into financial institutions.
Sadly, Finance is an industry built entirely with the intention of bedazzling customers. using technical complexity and jargon. It's been the same way since the early days of coffee shop trading.
That can be helpful if you are trying to avoid a marketplace getting spooked, but unhelpful if the market place has every right to be spooked, as in the sub-prime disaster. Or the original crash, the Dutch Tulip disaster, where at peak some tulip bulbs were worth more than houses.
Many may say sub-prime isn't a disaster, but oddly (not) they are the survivors in the Financial sector. They are categorically not those who experienced the fall out and financial ruin first hand, who can now no longer afford the cost or energy involved to dispute the "victors'" winning narratives.
There is in fact an enormous opportunity for a financial institution that gets the need for consumer trust to trade this way, but again, it's an easy way of living off other's people's need to put their money somewhere.
Just looking at the banking associations and otter hangers on who also make a lucrative lifestyle off what is or at least was in fact our money.
The incentives to avoid change, and even put newcomers who challenge the status quo out of business are enormous.
Our hope is that the flame of innovation continues to be unquenchable, and that challengers to banks will come along who are equally unquenchable.
Bitcoin has just such potential.
Banks are accordingly trying every trick in the book to make the emerging sector unviable and for participants to fall off a cliff.
Yes, Bitcoin carries risks about money laundering, but so do conventional bank accounts. At least with BitCoin, the ledgers are actually open to public scrutiny, which in time may make tracking transactions somewhat easier for authorities.
Of course if you enquire into bank's defensive behaviours here, you'll find a level of smoke and mirrors that will indeed bedazzle you.
HTH.
🙂
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