Your article misses a couple important things about the Ginko problems.

Ginko wasn’t really an investment bank in a normal sense. They were a bank which brought in money by advertising a 60% interest rate, and had been suspected of being a Ponzi scheme for a year or more.

The avatar who ran Ginko steadfastly refused to reveal either a transparent identity (who he was in real life) or to publish any financials at all.

In the real world, people don’t think about these things when they deposit money in an ATM, because they know (even unconsciously) that the FDIC is out there.

The fall of Ginko has had the desirable side effect of causing folks in Second Life to grow a bit more savvy. It is now hard for a financial company or even a company that seeks investment to launch without financials and without the executives substantiating real identities.

The Second Life Exchange Commission is struggling over standards of disclosure for this kind of information. The SLEC existed before the recent bank and exchange scandals, but has gotten a bit more attention since!

But within SL there is only reputation. There is no law, and there are no mechanisms other than reputation and honor by which to honor contracts. It is the anarcho-capitalist’s dream, and the unwary consumer’s nightmare (as far as capital markets and banks go).

The thing to understand is that there is no need to deposit a single “linden dollar” in a bank. Your money is as safe as it can be in the database associated with your account at Linden Lab. However, you won’t draw unreasonable interest rates from that! So, Ginko’s demise fed on a circle of greed that started with Nicholas, the avatar who ran it, and ended up touching thousands of others who chose not to question out of greed, or who were too naive to know they should question out of caution.