That is result of some really insane laws that has been written about a million times. They have known that zillionaires are using it to avoid paying taxes altogether, even after death.

as soon as wealth of any sort is collateralized the tax code should treat it as liquid and tax it. preferably heavily.

The headline is editorialized way beyond what the article is about:

> A new survey of 57 of the world’s biggest private banks and other lenders, conducted by Deloitte and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, offers the fullest picture yet of this opaque corner of finance. Banks don’t always break out such lending on their balance sheets, and there is no central tally of how much is outstanding. The report finds that stock-based lending, better known as Lombard loans to borrowers in Europe and Asia, is increasingly available to those lower down the wealth scale.

> ...

> In mid-October, Charles Schwab said its pledged asset line product available to people with at least $100,000 in nonretirement assets drove a 35% surge in bank-loan balances, to $72.3 billion in the third quarter. A spokeswoman said usage grew after Schwab launched a fully digital process three years ago that can get the loans approved within minutes.

Mixing "buy, borrow and die" up with a pledged asset line is ridiculous and clickbait to the point of disrespect for the reader's intelligence. The former is a boutique product used by the uber-rich (net worth in 9 figures minimum) to get around estate tax. They're certainly not using a pledged asset line, which is available to you and me but doesn't do anything for estate taxes.

The cynical read into this is WSJ is trying to whitewash the "buy, borrow and die" strategy using "hey, if the same strategy available to the plebs, then it must be morally justified, right?"

Won't the people using this strategy end up paying a lot more (in terms of percent ownership of their holdings) in an extended downturn?

Finance capitalism, the root of all evil.

the financial sector is an ongoing construction project, going the direction of all items having an easy way to be valued to the minute, with the merchant and reseller having the same price instead of a wildly different one, all items then being able to be used as collateral instantly, fractionally sold as shares, and with a derivatives market on top

this project is not done, it’s not close to done, but improvements in this space have led to more people being able to access this lending market

I see that improving beyond publicly traded equity and real estate