Banking and gambling

Having blogged so recently about the similarity between gambling and banking on the back of the Gambling Commission's survey about attitudes towards the former, I was struck by this description of the latter in Jerry White's history of London in the Nineteenth Century (Jonathan Cape, 2007; p. 164):

"The bankers of Lombard Street...loaned money at interest for a fixed (and usually short) term. To raise the cash they loaned, they might also sell paper at a discount. This was a credit system that gambled - 'ran a book' in Lombard Street jargon - on the creditworthiness of those who had issued or accepted a bill. In normal times, sound merchants and manufacturers honoured their bills and paid up. But if trade was bad, the risks could be high.... The London discount market was not the only game in the City. Stock-jobbing, that 'most active and decided spirit of gambling' [Rudolph Ackermann, The microcosm of London, (1808-10)], had come out of coffee houses into a 'stock exchange' in the last quarter of the eighteenth century."

I wonder whether, in 100 years from now, people look back on our current attitude to sports gambling, and the squabbles over betting exchanges, and wonder what all the fuss was about?