'We all want to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and Bernie Madoff,' said Jordan Belfort, the real-life Wolf of Wall Street, last month.
He was speaking to the New York Times for a piece about the current renewed hysteria for the kind of dodgy unscrupulous speculative penny stock trading that launched Belfort's career.
The Times revealed there were 1.9 trillion transactions last month on the over-the-counter markets where such stocks trade, according to the industry regulator Finra – up by over 2,000 per cent from a year ago.
This has been partly driven by the general frenzy for get-rich-quick fads like Bitcoin, SPACs, meme stocks such as GameStop and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).