A mini-comment

      Finance used to be a very esoteric field that only a few people in London and Paris and other world centers understand–Amsterdam and other places where financial technology emerged–but it’s becoming democratized. With each year that goes by the concepts of finance are being applied more broadly and involving more and more people. With electronic technology, it’s becoming more economical to offer sophisticated financial services to everyone. This is something that we’re seeing. I think the subprime crisis that the current financial crisis highlights this very well. What does subprime mean? Well I think it stands for the general population. The subprime mortgage market was bringing people into the mortgage market who in prior decades would not have been involved–would not have had any mortgage. The problem, of course, with the democratization of finance is that if you raise the participation in financial markets, then you bring in people who are: less and less knowledgeable; less and less understanding of concepts of finance; and less capable and more vulnerable to exploitation. So the democratization of finance is, I think, the ultimate mission of –I find central to this course but it brings with it dangerous hazards and we have to think very carefully about how we do it.