The gambling commission has recommended a limit of £30 maximum stake on fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTS), before the Government announces its review into FOBTS in the coming weeks. Professor Chris Brady of the University of Salford Business School, expert in gambling and trading behaviour, says that if the financial sector was as well regulated as the gambling one we could have avoided the financial crash.

These quotes are taken from an article first published in The Conversation.

Professor Brady said: "The American journalist and poet Ambrose Bierce wrote in his 1906 satire The Devil's Dictionary  that "the gambling known as business looks with severe disfavour on the business known as gambling".

"That phrase has a particular ring of truth about it when one starts to think about the "casino banking" that caused the financial crisis almost ten years ago. But that term was - and still is - a slur on casinos. If the financial services industry was as well-regulated and as well understood as the gambling industry, the financial collapse may have been avoided.

"At the root of all financial bubbles, scams and scandals is the self-proclaimed "professionalism" of the financial sector - what Nobel Prize-winning economist Freidrick von Hayek referred to as "the pretence of knowledge".

"Von Hayek admitted to the futility of trying to make economics "scientific" in the accepted sense of the word. Like any profession, the financial sector seeks to clothe its "pretence of knowledge" in the language it uses to distract its customers from recognising that it is simply an arm of the gambling industry. Substitute betting jargon for finance-speak and the reality becomes clearer. The majority of actions in the finance sector are bets.

"Professor of Economics Paul Seabright believes that the need to trust has evolved in the modern economy to such a point that "people give complete strangers sums of money they would not dream of entrusting to their next door neighbours". They do this because "professionals" have acquired prestige, power and wealth by "owning" knowledge and expertise and then selling it. This creates a dependency and a "pretence of knowledge", Seabright says. As such, the customer believes in the expertise of the "professional" without question.

"But once the language becomes real and "advisors" are recognised as "tipsters", then the transactions become demystified. These financial "tipsters" want you to give them your money to bet with. They want to charge you a "management" fee to bet with your money then they want a percentage of any profit made on that bet. If the bet loses then that is, of course, down to you.

"If people understand that this is what they are buying and they choose to listen to other people gambling with their money (on horses, football or stocks and shares) then so be it. But many people who gamble just don't get it and that is what is dangerous. As long as the financial sector is not understood for what it is - "the gambling known as business" - then financial scams and banking scandals will continue."

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