> Your stock brokerage, though, is willing to offer you leverage on your assets. In return for a fee (and to gain your business, because this is considered a high-saliency feature for the customers of brokerages), they will lend you money against your assets, allowing you to buy more Google than you had cash for. They might allow you 2:1 leverage when you buy stock: your $1,000 buys 20 shares now.

Not widely known, but it's the US Federal Reserve that tells stock brokers how much leverage their clients are allowed to assume. This is one of the most potent tools in the Fed's toolbox, and it has not used it since 1974:

https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...

Forget the sissy Fed funds rates, forget the lamo QE/QT ceremony, if the Fed really wanted to take compulsive gamblers to the woodshed, all it needs to do is raise the margin requirement, thus de-leveraging brokerage customers by force.

Whenever the topic of hash-related gambling catastrophes comes up, there's always an outcry for MOAR REGULATION.

If history had demonstrated that regulators not only knew when to use their tools but that they could wield them in a wise and timely manner, that would be one thing. But time and again regulators do the wrong thing at the wrong time.