Wealth & Money Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s sentence is engineered to sound like a calmly filed brief while smuggling in an indictment. The key move is his double “like”: advice to governments, like advice to industrialists. That symmetry turns what could be dismissed as a one-off scandal into a pattern, almost a business model. The line doesn’t need melodrama because its moral math is stark: “consistently good for bankers” versus “often disastrous” for everyone else. “Consistently” is the tell. It suggests not occasional self-interest but reliability, the kind you’d expect from a system with incentives aligned and accountability misdirected.

The subtext isn’t merely that bankers are greedy; it’s that governments and industry repeatedly outsource judgment to a class whose success metrics are private, not civic. Quigley is pointing to a structural asymmetry: when financial advice succeeds, bankers profit; when it fails, the losses can be socialized across states, firms, and citizens. That’s a critique of expertise as power - not the crude claim that bankers secretly rule, but the sharper implication that policy and enterprise can become downstream of credit conditions, debt terms, and the priorities of those who set them.

Context matters: Quigley, a mid-century historian of elite institutions, is writing in the long shadow of war finance, central banking ascendance, and the post-1929 reordering of economic governance. “As we shall see later” is a professor’s throat-clear, but it also signals confidence: he’s not offering a hot take, he’s promising receipts. The intent is to reframe “sound finance” as an interest-bearing ideology - persuasive precisely because it masquerades as neutral competence.