Internet Gambling: A Threat to Economic and Financial Systems

John Warren Kindt,  professor emeritus at the University of Illinois and senior editor to the United States International Gaming Report, warns of Internet gambling’s potential as a threat to economic and financial systems worldwide. 

Internet gambling is an issue of strategic financial stability and Wall Street regulation, he writes in an opt-in piece for Roll Call.

Kindt even goes on to suggest that Internet gambling will have more dire consequences than the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme: 

Recent academic volumes of the multi-volume United States International Gambling Report even have titles reflecting the international economic realities. Specifically, the 2010 volume is alarmingly titled “The Gambling Threat to Economic and Financial Systems: Internet Gambling.” The title of the 2012 volume is even more alarming: “The Gambling Threat to National and Homeland Security: Internet Gambling.”

In its news video “The Bet That Blew-Up Wall Street,” the website for 60 Minutes reports on gambling’s interface with the current crisis in credit default swaps. Cogently, Warren Buffett named the story “Financial WMDs,” while U.S. Senate hearings blasted this Wall Street gambling debacle as “casino capitalism.”

At least the subprime crisis had some real property as collateral. However, with Internet gambling there’s nothing of real value — just people dumping money into gambling accounts which can evaporate more easily than the Bernie Madoff monies.

U.S. gambling is an economic cancer ready to metastasize into Internet gambling, Kindt suggested. 

Countries cannot gamble their way to prosperity. Internet gambling shrinks the consumer economy and destroys consumer confidence by promoting a ubiquitous gambling philosophy.

- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com