Wealth & Money Quote by Vince Cable

Calling investment banking a casino is a politician's weaponized metaphor: it shrinks an industry that sells itself as sophisticated risk management into something everyone recognizes as glamorized recklessness. Vince Cable isn't just scoring a populist point. He's re-framing the 2008-era crisis as a moral and structural failure of policy, not merely a bad turn in the market. "Resembled" is doing strategic work here, leaving room for technical nuance while still landing the indictment.

The real sting is in the second clause: gambling losses didn't stay quarantined in the high-roller room. They "dragged down" traditional lending, the boring civic function banks are supposed to perform. That choice of verb implies an unfair transfer of pain: households and small businesses end up paying for bets they never placed, through tighter credit and a weaker economy. It also neatly captures the post-crisis reality of balance-sheet repair: deleveraging becomes austerity by another name, enforced not by parliaments but by capital ratios and wounded confidence.

Cable's phrase "modern financial liberalisation" signals the deeper target: decades of deregulation, light-touch oversight, and faith in self-correcting markets that treated complexity as competence. "One aspect" is a savvy hedge, too - he's not condemning capitalism wholesale, he's isolating a policy choice with identifiable culprits and correctable levers. The subtext is accountability: if liberalisation produced "dire consequences", then re-regulation isn't ideological backsliding; it's cleaning up after a failed experiment with other people's money.