15 January 2009

Galbraith strikes again

Anne--this one's for you!!

WRITING about one of the great swindles of the 1930s, J.K. Galbraith pointed to three traits of any financial community that he believed put it at risk of fraud.
There was the tendency, he wrote in 1961, to confuse good manners and good tailoring with integrity and intelligence. There was the sometimes “disastrous interdependence” between the honest man and the crook. And there was the “dangerous cliché that in the financial world everything depends on confidence. One could better argue the importance of unremitting suspicion.”

The Economist, 18.12.08
The Madoff affair
Dumb money and dull diligence
Like mould, Madoffs flourish in the darkness

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