My relationship with money started with a contract I couldn’t fully read.
I was five years old when my father introduced me to our shared accounting system. Not a real bank account, that would have been illegal in Italy for someone my age, but something more intimate. A ledger. A notebook where every transaction was recorded and required two signatures: mine and his. Any money I received, whether birthday gifts or pocket money, could be logged. But nothing came out without mutual agreement.
My father is an accountant. Not the stereotypical number-crunching figure you might imagine, but someone who understood that money is just a language for describing how value moves through the world. He wanted me to learn that language early, the way some parents teach their children chess or music.
The weekly allowance came with conditions. A fixed amount every Saturday. Once it was gone, it was gone until the following week. No advances, no exceptions. But here was the interesting part: if I chose to save twenty percent of that allowance in our ledger, my father would match the total at year’s end with a gift equivalent to the entire balance. Maybe more.
I didn’t understand compound interest at five. I definitely didn’t grasp the behavioral economics my father was teaching me. What I understood was immediate: toys, candy, cards to trade with friends at school. The future was abstract. The present was everything.
So for three years, I spent every cent.
Then something shifted when I was eight or nine. There was a game console I wanted desperately. A PlayStation 2. Everyone at school seemed to have one, and I’d spent enough afternoons at friends’ houses to know exactly what I was missing. I asked my father if he could buy it. He said no, not directly, but I could save for it if I wanted it badly enough.
I did the math, or at least my eight-year-old version of it. At my current spending rate, I’d never accumulate enough. The console cost more than six months of allowances. But if I actually followed the twenty percent rule, if I stopped buying things I’d forget about in a week, the matching gift at year’s end would get me close.
That’s when the lesson clicked. Not because my father explained it better, but because I finally had a reason to care about something beyond next Saturday.
It took discipline I didn’t know I had. Watching friends buy things while I saved. Explaining why I couldn’t go to the arcade when they did. But when that PlayStation arrived, wrapped and waiting on my birthday, it felt different from anything I’d been given before. Not because it was expensive, but because I’d understood the mechanism that made it possible.
My father never pushed economics on me. He just lived it. I’d see him reading Il Sole 24 Ore every morning, Italy’s main financial newspaper, the way other parents read sports sections. I’d hear him on calls with clients discussing tax optimization, salary structures, fiscal opportunities. His office had shelves of books on economic thought, and sometimes I’d pull one down just to see what captured his attention.
By fifteen, I was reading those same newspapers daily. Not the sports or culture sections. The markets, macroeconomics, policy analysis. I started working through books on economic philosophy, fascinated by how different thinkers constructed entirely different models of how society should organize itself.
Galbraith’s critique of corporate power. Keynes and the role of government intervention. Rothbard’s radical libertarianism. The contrasts were what hooked me. These weren’t just academic debates. They were fundamental disagreements about human nature, freedom, fairness, what we owe each other. Economics wasn’t just about money. It was about everything.
I chose economics for university assuming I’d find others who felt the same way. People who stayed up late arguing about monetary policy. Who read economics the way some people read philosophy or literature. Who cared about the ideas underneath the models.
Instead, I found something else entirely.
The shock wasn’t that people studied differently than I did. It was that most didn’t seem to care about economics at all. They cared about passing exams. About memorizing enough to get through. About optimizing page counts and study techniques to minimize time invested. The entire enterprise felt mechanical, transactional. Learn what’s necessary, regurgitate it, move on.
I’m aware this sounds judgmental. Maybe I’m being unfair. But sitting in those lecture halls, I felt like I’d shown up to the wrong place. I thought I was joining a community of people obsessed with understanding how economies actually work. Instead, I’d entered a credentialing system where the credential mattered more than the knowledge.
My interests started shifting after that. I discovered marketing, sales, the startup world. That environment had the energy I’d been looking for. People building things, testing ideas in real time, failing and iterating quickly. It felt more honest somehow. Less about appearing knowledgeable and more about producing results.
For years, economics and finance moved to the background. I still read about them occasionally, but the passion had dimmed. I’d found other things to care about.
Then something interesting happened recently. I started reading finance again, but with different eyes. Not the theoretical frameworks I’d studied in university. Not the macro policy debates that fascinated me at fifteen. Something darker and more specific.
Financial fraud. Ponzi schemes. The elaborate structures people build to extract wealth from systems designed, theoretically, to prevent exactly that.
I read The Wizard of Lies about Bernie Madoff’s decades-long fraud. Black Edge about insider trading networks at the highest levels. Stories of how smart, credentialed people construct these paper castles, these beautiful lies that hold together just long enough to transfer enormous wealth before collapsing.
What strikes me isn’t just the scale of deception. It’s how often these schemes exploit the same trust mechanisms that make functional economies possible. Madoff didn’t succeed because people were stupid. He succeeded because the system depends on trust, and he understood exactly how to weaponize that dependence.
There’s something grimly fascinating about this corner of finance. Not because I admire the deception, but because it reveals how the system actually works when you strip away the textbook explanations. The gaps between what we say markets do and what actually happens in practice. The difference between economic theory and economic reality.
My father taught me early that money is a language. What I’m learning now is that like any language, it can be used to clarify or to obscure. The same tools that enable coordination and value creation can be turned toward extraction and manipulation. Capital isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s just a system with particular rules and particular vulnerabilities.
This isn’t cynicism. Or at least I don’t think it is. I’m not disillusioned with finance itself. I’m genuinely interested in understanding it, including the parts that don’t appear in academic curricula. The schemes, the exploits, the moments where someone figures out how to game the system.
Because that’s knowledge too. Not the kind that wins you praise in economics departments, but knowledge that explains how the world actually functions. Why certain regulations exist. Why trust is valuable. Why financial systems need both incentives and constraints.
The disappointment I felt at university wasn’t really about the other students. It was about realizing that understanding systems and credentialing yourself as an expert in systems are two different things. One requires genuine curiosity and the willingness to look at uncomfortable realities. The other just requires passing exams.
Looking back at that five-year-old learning to track money in a shared ledger with his father, I realize he was teaching me something more fundamental than compound interest. He was showing me that financial systems are human constructions. They have rules, but those rules were created by people, for people. And here’s what Phil Knight understood when he borrowed from a general’s observation: rules are made to be broken. That’s not cynicism, it’s just the nature of rules. They’re human designs, and humans always find the edges, the gaps, the exceptions.
I’m still reading about finance. More intensely now than in years. Not because I think I’ll work in it directly, but because understanding money means understanding power, incentive, human behavior at scale. And understanding how systems can be exploited means understanding how they actually work, not how we wish they worked.
My father’s ledgers taught me that money is just information. What fascinates me now are the lies people tell with that information, the paper castles they build, and occasionally, spectacularly, how those castles collapse.
I don’t condone this behavior. It’s not normal life, not the path I’d choose or recommend. But here’s what I can’t ignore: some people do choose it, and some of them prosper wildly within this capitalist system. Not despite breaking the rules, but because they understood something fundamental about how the game actually works. If that’s true, if that pattern keeps repeating, then maybe there’s a truth buried in there we’re supposed to pretend doesn’t exist. Not a comfortable truth. Not one that fits in textbooks. But truth nonetheless.
That’s not disillusionment. That’s just what genuine interest looks like when you stop expecting the world to match the version you were taught to believe in.