Gambling or investing? In America, the line is increasingly blurred

Economists and financiers have compared stockmarkets to gambling since 1936, when Keynes warned of “the capital development of a country becom[ing] a by-product of the activities of a casino”. In 1999 Jack Bogle of Vanguard decried the “Wall Street casino” where only croupiers got rich, and in 2023 Warren Buffett wrote that “markets now exhibit far more casino-like behaviour than…when I was young”.