I wrote earlier about financial literacy, and how it was a good idea but could too easily be captured by the sales culture of the financial industry and bent to its own objectives.
Susan Antilla of Bloomberg.com highlights just that concern in an excellent article, titled "Suckers of the Future Groomed With Stock Game". Antilla points out that the Securities and Exchange Commission's new deputy director of investor education, Kathleen M. Floyd, was formerly executive director of the Stock Market Game, "a virtual-investing program that’s given hundreds of thousands of students a $100,000 make-believe portfolio to play with."
"Her employer was a foundation financed by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Wall Street’s main lobbying group. Floyd’s hiring brings new attention to the popular Stock Market Game, which gets money from donors like Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and A.G. Edwards."
This game, however, educates students not to be investors, but gamblers on short-term stock prices -- in other words, to be brokerage firms' dream customers, their Suckers of the Future.
One commentator in Antilla's article says, “You could teach kids the basic rules of blackjack and have a more lasting and beneficial impact.” Well yes, more beneficial for the kids perhaps. But teaching the game will have a lasting and beneficial impact for its Wall Street sponsors, providing them with an endless parade of future suckers.
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