Many young people have lost faith and are turning, with alarming recklessness, to increasingly risky financial behaviour.

Once upon a time, if you were an average individual of average means with a modest amount of savings, and you wished to make an investment for your own or your family's future, you (or a trusted partner) might research investments - stocks or bonds or real estate or even simple bank products. Then you would choose to park your money somewhere and wait patiently for it to grow. What you would not do is go to a casino and feed your precious savings into a slot machine with the hope of hitting the jackpot.

That would be just stupid, right?

Not anymore, it seems.

In the past few years we have seen an epidemic of what is now being called "financial nihilism", an expression coined in 2021 by Demetri Kofinas, the host of the Hidden Forces podcast. The term is now in wide use, especially across social media. It has a dramatic ring to it, as an awkward mix of unlikely linguistic bedfellows.

The definition is loose, but financial nihilism generally refers to an increase in reckless investments and gambling by people who believe that the system is rigged against them. Convinced that there is no point...