I'll leave it up to the finance people to come up with interesting instruments to take advantage of these kids. Maybe their bank accounts will just become money market accounts that are tied to leveraged ETFs.
I think abstracting away their real life money into a crypto that is worth 1/10th of the dollar is a good way to go. Make that crypto the exclusive currency for their habits (games, social media) so they have no choice but to convert to it. Easy way to part them from their real earnings that way.
There's easy money here if you are ruthless. If you print your own crypto for their habits, you can effectively act like the US Fed. Just inflate away the value of their coins every time. It's a no brainer.
Too many people fell for it for them all to just be morons, but that's not my point. What I'm saying is that young people will make fall for all sorts of scams if the adults in their life (and government incentives) push them in the wrong direction. Same thing for older generations thinking that things like social security was ever going to be more than a Ponzi scheme (similarly, too many boomers fell for it for me to write them all off as morons).
Getting kids addicted to gambling with virtual currencies might shape the structure of the scams, but the idea that Gen Z is going to be uniquely vulnerable to finance scams doesn't track for me.
It's been a meme for a long time that certain majors have little economic value, the entire liberal arts major joke is just one example of this. People make fun of things like underwater basket weaving (and not majors like engineering) for a reason. If someone didn't know the worth of their major and the resultant job prospects, then that's really on them.
