" It takes talent, ambition, and brains. And the banking world is brimming with clever minds. “The genius of the great speculative investors is to see what others do not, or to see it earlier,” explains the economist Roger Bootle. “This is a skill. But so is the ability to stand on tiptoe, balancing on one leg, while holding a pot of tea above your head, without spillage.”12 In other words, the fact that something is difficult does not automatically make it valuable. In recent decades those clever minds have concocted all manner of complex financial products that don’t create wealth, but destroy it. These products are, essentially, like a tax on the rest of the population. Who do you think is paying for all those custom-tailored suits, sprawling mansions, and luxury yachts? If bankers aren’t generating the underlying value themselves, then it has to come from somewhere – or someone – else. The government isn’t the only one redistributing wealth. The financial sector does it, too, but without a democratic mandate. "

― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World