Comment by IneptatNormal on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 · 2012-04-06T04:47:06.391Z · LW · GW

I think it's also important to remember that all these fancy smancy new ways of making money haven't really been around that long.

Wizards live to be more than a hundred years old, and in general don't have a bunch of children. There's been only a couple generations in which many of these money making methods have been around - for example, the stock market has only existed in a convenient form since, say, 1910? And this story takes place in 1992. Eighty years really isn't that long in wizard years. And while a small percentage ten-year-olds in the 1990s might happen to have some idea of how the stock market can be manipulated for personal gains, probably only a vastly smaller number may have known in, say, 1940 - before the information age.

The noble houses - the wizards that probably make up the majority of the Wizenagamot - are kind of implied to have been rich and powerful for a long time. If any of these people are young enough to have gone to Hogwarts after the thirties, and been humble enough to have taken Muggle Studies, and really paid attention when it came to the Great Depression, and happened to do background reading on the subject in order to exploit it, then sure, maybe it's already done.

But given the information we have, I doubt this is widely known and regularly done enough to be a problem for Harry.