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Our touching need for confidence

People think you have to be brilliant to be an investment banker, but it’s not rocket science.

Dennis Levine, investment banker jailed in 1987 for insider dealing

If investors believed that the entire financial services industry was crooked and that an outsider would always be cheated, what would happen? All other factors remaining equal, investors would simply stop putting their money into financial investments. Money would flow out of shares, bonds, derivatives and cash deposits and into some other type of asset such as residential property. But that has not happened in the major financial markets. On the contrary, they have massively expanded during the last 40 years, and millions of new investors from all ...

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