Aizle wrote:
Gambling is a tax on people who are bad at statistics.
And while I agree that those Wall Street Brokerage entities had little/no count-part risk, that was due to their lack of ethics and lax regulations around the radical financial products they were concocting and foisting off on the banking industry.
No. Greed is a good thing. It's what keeps counter-party risk alive. It's the basis for credit risk, for lending in general. It's what keeps subprime lending in check. Ultimately, someone has to bear the counter-party credit risk associated with the underlying asset: the subprime mortgage.
Gambling isn't about statistics, it's about greed. People gamble, but even more people don't. But ultimately people either gamble or they don't because of greed; greed of the gain they could get or greed to risk and not lose money.
By extending your logic to the general population, we should all be on casinos all the time and constantly buying lotto tickets. Our greed is what keeps us from doing so.