Wealth & Money Quote by Scott Cook

Cook’s line lands like a casual history lesson, but it’s really a piece of entrepreneurial mythmaking: the world was locked, then deregulation handed innovators the key. As a businessman, he’s not doing statutory nuance; he’s staking out a moral about why modern finance looks the way it does, and why “innovation” in money should be treated as natural, even inevitable.

The specific intent is to frame product creation in banking as something that had to be liberated. “Basically illegal” is doing heavy rhetorical work: it compresses a maze of Depression-era safeguards, interest-rate caps, charter restrictions, and regulator skepticism into a single, blunt obstacle. That simplification isn’t a bug; it’s a sales pitch for a worldview where regulation is the primary barrier to progress and where new financial products are synonymous with consumer benefit.

The subtext is also defensive. Post-1980 finance carries baggage: credit-card explosion, securitization, fee harvesting, the slow normalization of complexity that culminated in crisis. Cook’s phrasing preemptively shifts attention from the harms of financial engineering to the supposed absurdity of forbidding it. If something was “basically illegal,” then today’s sprawling product universe becomes less like a choice and more like a correction.

Context matters: the 1980s mark a turning point in U.S. banking, when inflation, competition, and policy changes eroded New Deal constraints and banks began behaving more like product companies. Cook, a tech-and-consumer-business figure, is importing Silicon Valley’s innovation narrative into finance: move fast, ship features, let the market judge. The bite of the quote is how neatly it turns a contested political shift into a common-sense origin story.