Yes, the ol’ Colombian marching powder may well be responsible for one of the worst financial crises of modern economics since the Great Depression. According to Professor David Nutt, that is.
Nutt has sighted the prevalence of the recreational drug within the banking sector and linked it to over-confidence and the taking of greater risks as a result.
Nutt’s theory has found support, oddly enough from those within the banking sector, amongst those a former stockbroker Geraint Andersen.
“When you are on coke you don’t stand back and analyse things,” said Andersen in an interview with Reuters.
“You’re 100% sure what you’re doing is the right thing. And that kind of over-confidence and arrogance to some extent may explain, or help explain how people can sell products that in my opinion were quite clearly doomed to fail at some point.”
You’re preaching to the choir there, buddy.
Scientists have apparently even gone so far as to compare the very act of trading stocks (the meat and drink of the stockbrocker/banker) with the taking of narcotics, arguing that both release levels of dopamine, a chemical the brain sends out when we are taking risks.
God forbid that the real reasons for the Global Financial Crisis should lie squarely at the doors of the old billionaire owners and CEO’s who played Russian Roulette with their clients money in an act of such dizzying hubris that it defies description.
“It wasn’t my fault, it was the drugs!”
Yeah, right.
Image: Getty
