At the end of the day, the hard limit in finance is defaulting. Everything outside that is financial poetry (or engineering :-p).

I know every segment of finance loves to pretend that's not the case, because their jobs (and high salaries) frequently rely on that not being true (see the subprime mortgage crisis).

> At the end of the day, the hard limit in finance is defaulting. Everything outside that is financial poetry (or engineering :-p).

You are forgetting all about regulations and taxation (and how to work with / around them). And how to cleverly read documents, and exploit loop holes in contracts.

There's so much more to finance.

(And for eg stocks or commodities, there's not even any notion of defaulting. Defaulting only really makes sense when you have fixed obligations. 'Fixed income' is only one part of finance.)

> (see the subprime mortgage crisis)

That's actually a more nuanced topic than you think. See eg https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/subprime-bank-runs-and-t... and other posts by Kevin Erdmann on the topic.