Greed, Greed, and more Greed

I can't help but consider the root causes of our current economic state of affairs, and it comes down to unbridled greed. The necessity felt by all in business to do better, to do more, to make more money - quarter after quarter, year after year. The insatiable NEED for profits has created a house of cards that we've seen flattened in very short order.

In looking through my collection of news sources this morning, I was struck by the comment in one piece that banks and investments banks, collapsed together by the now discredited abandonment of Glass-Steagall, were driven to find new sources of profit at the time of the collapses of the dot.coms in 2000 and 2001. We'd heard of derivatives long before this, of course, but the "sophistication" of these instruments -- such a malapropism -- has now gone way beyond what even my most "sophisticated" friends on Wall Street could easily describe in lay terms.

I can't but wonder now what this human drive for ever-higher standards of living by our wealthiest citizens will create out of the chaos of a global financial meltdown. Much is being said now about a return to a slow growth economy -- a weird nostalgia for the values that came out of the depression that for a short time made America the wealthiest and most powerful nation known in history. See Jim Cramer's September 29 piece in New York magazine and his comparisons with today's situation with that in the movie, It's a Wonderful Life. (http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/50520/) Are we craving for a break from the pressures of quarterly earnings reports, workaholism, and total lack of balance between a healthy standard of living and the basic demands of capitalism, even as we are in utter terror about a global financial meltdown the likes of which no one has ever seen?