Comment by scubbo

Interesting - I'll definitely have to think on that one, thank you! I suppose another required assumption (implied but not explicitly stated) is that the activities undertaken by "people who need to raise cash" are, on balance, good things for actual people. Despite the fact that we overwhelmingly hear about the negative examples, I guess this is _probably_ true? Ugh, I suppose so.

I wonder if there's a way to derive those same benefits (people doing useful work have access to funds) without the exploitable loopholes (sufficiently clever and evil people can shuffle numbers around and fabricate wealth without _actually_ affecting loan-availability)? I suspect that's probably a provable invariant - you can't have one without the other. Shame.