State lotteries are rigged: marketed to the gullible & have far worse payouts than casinos. (Have you seen stare-sponsored Keno games like "California Hot Spot", with draws every 4 minutes, offered in only the very finest neighborhoods' liquor stores to extremely wise gamblers?)
Mortgages were pushed to sketchy credit risks for years, wiping out the the poor's earnings & equity with unsustainable housing costs in (temporarily) pubic-policy-inflated home values - and even now, there's minimal protection against over-concentrating in unwise housing markets.
Plenty of public securities go to zero, often in fraud. But with easy-to-get investing leverage, any amount of initial capital can go to zero with only small moves in public prices. You can lose any amount of money after a small move of AAPL up - if you purchase enough (or leveraged) securities which bet on it going down, which are available to anyone without an accredited-investor-like wealth test.
(Have you seen the promotions, and easy on-ramps, for daytrading & foreign-exchange trading & Robinhood? Or how easy it is to channel any amount of money into crypto trading?)
Mortgages were pushed to sketchy credit risks for years, wiping out the the poor's earnings & equity with unsustainable housing costs in (temporarily) pubic-policy-inflated home values - and even now, there's minimal protection against over-concentrating in unwise housing markets.
Plenty of public securities go to zero, often in fraud. But with easy-to-get investing leverage, any amount of initial capital can go to zero with only small moves in public prices. You can lose any amount of money after a small move of AAPL up - if you purchase enough (or leveraged) securities which bet on it going down, which are available to anyone without an accredited-investor-like wealth test.
(Have you seen the promotions, and easy on-ramps, for daytrading & foreign-exchange trading & Robinhood? Or how easy it is to channel any amount of money into crypto trading?)