Banks are unprofitable because they make too many bad loans and their good loans have little profit in them. They also have the dubious advantage of … - Eugene Rotberg

Sigmund Freud would have been a wonderful witness here. He would have explained the use of derivatives as denial and rationalization—the pretense that we are doing one thing when we really mean to do something else; the relationship between the banker and its client as one of ambivalence and reliance on the father figure; the use of accounting conventions as repression and the absence of reality testing; the work environment as the pleasure/pain principle—current pleasure for future damage, let someone else pick up the pieces; leveraging and doubling our bets as counter-phobic behavior; termination therapy as what happens when the CFO and Treasurer get caught; and, of course, transference—how the trader seeks to shift responsibility to his or her superior when the string runs out.

Always measure opportunities lost.”<ref>Rotberg, Eugene. (2009).

“Admit we are not sure of all the risks. . . .