The Secret Life of Greed

Introduction: A Culture of Greed?Greed was widely and unambiguously identified by many experts as one of the chief culprits behind the catastrophic financial crisis of 2008. This explanation gained public notoriety in view of investigations into Goldman Sachs's shell game, which contributed to the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble, the near collapse of major business sectors such as the auto industry, and the evaporated personal life-savings of thousands of Americans. It was coupled with news reports of top financial executives who had multiplied their salaries and bonuses like some dark version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, while employees in the same firms lost their jobs and, in some cases, all their retirement savings. Looking for an explanation in the immediate wake of the crisis, seemed to say it best.1This verdict should come as little surprise. On July 16, 2002, a number of years prior to those precipitous months that brought the world economy to the brink of a second Depression, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve (1987-2006), told the Senate Banking Committee that by the late 1990s the American corporate culture had become corrupt as regulatory mechanisms were overwhelmed by the proliferation of avenues to express greed [that] had grown so enormously.* 2 June of 2012 the Chancellor of the Exchequer publically stated that in the years 2005, 2006, and early 2007, [there was] evidence of systematic greed at the expense of financial integrity and stability and that the mischief of key players in Londons financial sector had elevated greed above all other concerns and brought our economy to its knees.3 May of 2013, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, publicly criticized the international banking community for failing to safeguard society's economic machinery from the personal voracity of its entrusted administrators: These abuses have reinforced questions about the fundamental values of people in the system.4 The commentaries are all the more compelling for three reasons: first, they bracket the crisis by a significant time-span; second, the nature of such admissions would not be offered lightly, coming as they did from the highest levels of government; and third, despite different national economic interests they still converge on this same point. Together, these indicate that the greed narrative is not a flash in the pan.No amount of moral reprimand or legal barrier is able to extinguish this kind of brash, deep, insatiable, and ultimately mysterious desire for money and possessions, along with the allied aphrodisiac of power. Regulations be damned: In the end virtue can't be regulated, states Carney. Ultimately it's a question of personal responsibility.5 Like water running downhill, greed always finds a way unless this proclivity is relegated to a system that extinguishes all individual economic entrepreneurialism. But the twentieth-century experiments of social engineering in communism and socialism ended disastrously by crushing individual dignity and emasculating personal initiative.What is greed? contrast to its more elegant synonyms avarice, cupidity, and covetousness, this word implies an extra measure of depravity. The synonyms are suited for polite conversation; greed is the street moniker for when the grittier reality hits home. But fundamentally it means to crave after something that is in no way necessary for life sustenance; Aquinas described it as an immoderate love of possessing.6 The object of greed need not only be money or a thing, which are its more familiar incarnations. It is the artist who even after becoming well-established never feels sufficiently recognized; it is the hockey parent whose son or daughter never scores enough goals; it is the teenager who at all costs must have the latest online game. It is in the church with the hunger for hierarchical advancement, when the advice of lawyers and the protection of its financial interests trump ethical ways of dealing with the clergy sexual abuse crisis, and where hatchet-clergymen are deployed at arms length by higher echelon church leaders with economic rationalizations that are little different from the Machiavellian intrigues of the corporate world. …

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