There are many stunning moments in the documentary Inside Job that brilliantly demystifies the story behind the global financial crisis that began in 2008. For me, the most powerful was something the CEO of a large bank said to his fellow guests at a party held by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson at the height of the crisis.
"We can't control our greed," the CEO acknowledged, in a rare moment of candor and insight. "You should regulate us more."
Greed is defined as an excessive desire for wealth or goods. At its most rapacious, greed trumps rationality, judgment, perspective, and any concern with the collateral damage it may cause.
As Michael Lewis has written, "It's more than a little nuts for a man who has a billion dollars to devote his life to making another billion, but that's what some of our most exalted citizens do, over and over again."
Greed begins in the neurochemistry of the brain. What fuels our greed is a neurotransmitter called dopamine. The higher the dopamine levels in the brain, the more pleasure we experience. Cocaine, for example, directly increases dopamine levels.
By using magnetic resonance imaging studies, the Harvard researcher Hans Breiter and his colleagues have found that the craving for money activates the same regions of the brain as the craving for cocaine, or sex, or any other instant and intense pleasure.
Dopamine is most reliably activated by novel stimuli -- meaning an experience we haven't had before. We crave recreating that experience. But here's the problem: If we snort the same amount of cocaine the next time, or earn the same sum of money, dopamine levels tend not to increase.
It wasn't money these architects of our demise were after, but rather the satisfaction and security they anticipated money would provide -- as it had after their first windfalls. When the rush began to diminish over time, the solution they landed on was to up the ante -- dramatically.
If the previous amount didn't do it, then maybe twice as much would -- or three times, or ten. It's a viciously seductive cycle: chasing the increasingly elusive high, forever seeking to recreate that initial rush of pleasure and well-being. When it becomes compulsive, we call it addiction.
Money, and the power and admiration it buys, is the drug. Addicts typically use drugs to avoid pain -- most often the pain of feeling insecure and unworthy. Money, like cocaine, gets mistaken for the route to relief.
In the absence of intimate connections to others, or deeply held values, or work devoted to a cause beyond themselves, accumulating wealth becomes the only way these bankers have to try to infuse their lives with meaning, significance and satisfaction.
It's a pattern that helps explain why Angelo Mozilo, then CEO of Countrywide, would allow his employees to write tens of thousands of home mortgages he knew were likely to default, while selling off his shares in the company as fast as he could, before their inevitable crash.
Or why Steven Rattner, the politically connected founder of the Quadrangle Group, who hoped to someday become Treasury Secretary, would trash his career by making kickbacks to public officials so that he could add a few more million dollars to the several hundred million he already had.
Or why top executives at so many banks were willing to turn a blind eye as long as the toxic and doomed financial products they were selling delivered big short-term profits that translated into huge personal bonuses.
The bankers and their paid enablers -- notably regulators and academic economists and equally Democrats and Republicans -- were all feeding at the same till. Greed makes for strange bedfellows. But as with any addiction, more and more eventually led to less and less.
Throughout Inside Job, bankers justify their greedy, dishonest, and destructive behaviors the same way all addicts do: by hemming and hawing, rationalizing and minimizing, denying and dissembling.
A cocaine addict plainly does damage to himself and to those closest to him. What's so frightening about those with an addiction to money (and skill at accumulating it) is that the cost can be so great to so many.
Few of us are immune to money's powerful seduction, but most of never get the opportunity to accumulate huge amounts of it. Count us fortunate. It would be wonderful to believe that those most responsible for the current financial crisis learned sobering lessons from the worldwide havoc and suffering they helped to prompt.
Don't hold your breath -- especially so long as we continue to revere our citizens based on their net worth, even as they've knocked down ours.
"We can't control our greed," the bank CEO at Hank Paulson's party tells the assembled guests. "Protect me from my own most primitive impulses," he was essentially saying. "And protect yourselves, too."
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Seems like that's what the Washington Politicians want to do...
I am all in favor of a hefty estate tax to level the playing field. These people get enough of an advantage just by virtue of their access to education and social connections.
That being said, I sure wouldn't turn down a nice little stipend. It would stem the flow of stress related hormones that flood my neurological pathways far to often.
The problem with these "insiders" is that they did not "make" money. They did not invest in innovations and products which sold well and brought them pfofits. They made "hedge bets." They bought and sold *debt*, which is only a potential value, or, arguably, a negative value. Their wealth was and is an abstraction on top of an abstraction (unless they bought gold, they probably don't have their millions and billions in cash).
Unfortunately, these people as individuals remain abstractly wealthy - and their baseless wealth is real enough to get them whatever material goods and whatever services they may desire. Meanwhile, millions of us lose very real houses and jobs.
All Americans need to remember that big numbers in bank accounts and investments do not give a person merit; we should not automatically assume such people are "bold entrepreneurs" who deserve our admiration. We must ask whether or not they truly "made" their money.
Overall, I'll believe that avarice is a sickness, not for the person doing it, but for the society that suffers to bear it. In terms of our economy, debt is cancerous, and avarice, egoism/objectivism, waste, apathy, and illiteracy (poor education) are the primary carcinogens.
Overall, I'll agree that avarice is a sickness, not for the person doing it, but for the society that suffers to bear it. In terms of our economy, debt is cancerous, and avarice, egoism/objectivism, waste, apathy, and illiteracy (poor education) are the primary carcinogens.
Steal a hundred dollars and they’ll put you in stir,
Steal a hundred million, they’ll address you as sir,
Scientists will tell you it’s a matter of bulk and size,
Steal Manhattan Island and it’s yours for a prize...
Steal a silver teapot and you’ll land in Sing Sing,
Steal the Roman empire and they make you a king,
So don’t rob a bank, take the whole city hall,
And never steal anything small...
Steal a farmers chickens, you get shot in the rear,
Steal a string of oil wells, you’re a big financier,
Every would-be burglar should engrave it upon his brains,
If the theft is large enough it’s capitol gains!
Bribe a few policeman, you’ll be covered with grief,
Bribe the whole department and they’ll make you the chief!
You’ll always be judged by the size of your haul,
So never steal anything small!
1. It means the same as 'agreed"-- i.e. there is a debt you "agreed" to pay, and the clock is running, and your agressiveness to get money is based on the desire to solve your debt problem.
2. If you have more money than someone else, the moral stigma of inequality can rev up the other's desire to rectify things, so the greater the disparity between how much money you have and how much (s)he has, the more you need to spend on PROTECTING the money you do have. The relation might be geometrical: if you have double someone else's money, you spend quadruple as much on protection.
Example: the USA has 4.5% of world population; uses over 20% of all resources; has to protect the stability of this situation by spending 50% of all armaments expenditures.
Overall, I'll agree that avarice is a sickness, not for the person doing it, but for the society that suffers to bear it. More correctly, debt is the cancer, and avarice is the carcinogen.
Having said that, let me say this:
Nearly three-quarters-of-a-century after it was made illegal; half-a-century after it was proven to be practically harmless - why is it still a crime to possess and smoke marijuana?
Here is a list of ten famous people - heavy smokers all - who died as a result of nicotine abuse:
Humphrey Bogart
Edward R. Murrow
Nat King Cole
George Harrison
John Huston
Noel Coward
Betty Grable
Walt Disney
Gary Cooper
Peter Jennings
Here is another list. Ten famous people who died from alcoholism:
Tennessee Williams
Jack Kerouac
Truman Capote
Lorenz Hart
Veronica Lake
Bix Beiderbecke
Montgomery Clift
Dylan Thomas
John Barrymore
Errol Flynn
Now I'm going to ask you to name for me one celebrity who has died from too much grass.
Go on, I'm waiting.....
You couldn't do it, could you? No, neither could I. Not only have I never heard of anyone dying in that matter, I am not aware of it happening in all recorded human history! Why, in 2010, are we still having this stupid conversation?
http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com
Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
The others seems to revel in the "happiness" POWER tof he money they have WIELDS in the dellusions of their egos & public admiration for all thier toys and trinkets.
The poor peoples whom invite you into their homes to share what little they have do so with an enormouse amount of genuine happiness glowing on their faces.
some people are just too smart & too wise for greed, prefering humbler & more meaningfull lives
surrounded by community & famly values.
LET the castles fall, & the meek toil the soil