We invent financial devices.
This is done through cut-outs, phony foundations, numbered accounts, intelligence proprietaries, leveraged currency speculation through proxies in unregulated hedge funds and a hundred other financial devices.
Some of these financial devices serve valuable functions and are funded by the appropriate parties, and therefore their use should be encouraged.
Instead, he obtained increasingly elaborate employment contracts, filled with stock option plans, bonuses and other intricate financial devices designed to provide great reward without corresponding risk.
Major companies could make (or fake) larger profits by financial devices: writing futures contracts, investing in stocks, juggling pension funds, moving low-return assets into separate partnerships and substituting stock options for salary expenses.
Senator Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland, the chairman, said, "It's going to deal with accounting standards, oversight, public disclosure of financial devices, auditor independence, all the things relating to investor protection and corporate responsibility".
Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs.
Yet no one saw the Greek or Italian sovereign debt crises coming because governments made their fiscal status look rosy by using new financial devices to swap their debts in one currency for another.
If only those who spend their days designing ever more complex financial devices would instead turn their minds to working out how best to structure the financial markets so as to maximise investment in, and returns from, the productive economy, then we might all share in the benefits of a dynamic and growing economy.
Why invest in the production of goods and services which offer a modest return over a long period, when you can place bets on minor fluctuations in prices for all manner of financial devices invented for the sole purpose of quickly generating higher than average returns?
