Imagine, for a second, how finance began, with small loans within families and between trusted friends. As the circle of lenders and borrowers grew, financial transactions were able to muster larger sums and to spread risk, even as promises became harder to enforce. Paul Seabright, an economist at the University of Toulouse in France, observes that trust in a modern economy has evolved to the miraculous point where people give complete strangers sums of money they would not dream of entrusting to their next-door neighbours. From that a further miracle follows, for trust is what raises the billions of dollars that fund modern industry.
Trust’s slow accumulation pushes financial markets forward; its shattering betrayal batters them back. Sometimes this is through bad faith, as when Bernie Madoff, a grand fund manager, allegedly made his investors $50 billion poorer, or mortgage-sellers tempted naive borrowers. But promises made in good faith can be broken too. Indeed, honest failure is even more corrosive of trust than outright criminality. Everyone understands that now.
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