

Gambling or investing? In America, the line is increasingly blurred
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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".
Despite this similarity, governments promote bets on companies while discouraging those on cards, dice or sports. Gambling is a zero-sum endeavour in which the house always wins in the end, whereas investing promotes economic growth and distributes the gains among all (diversified) participants. As a result, the companies and legal regimes involved in gaming are mostly separate from those in financial services.
In recent months, however, the line between investing and gambling has arguably been blurred out of existence. America once stood out both for tight limits on gambling and for mass participation in the stockmarket. But policy has shifted.
In 2018 the Supreme Court let states permit sports betting, which 39 of the 50 have done. Last October Kalshi, a prediction market regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc), won a lawsuit enabling it to offer event contracts, which pay $1 to winners and $0 to losers, on the presidential election (Donald Trump traded at 59% on election day). In July Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market off-limits to Americans, bought a cftc-registered exchange to build a competing product.
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