The Consciousness of Greed - A blog by Monika Mitchell

Greed is destructive, cruel, primal. Yet it is nothing new. It has existed since time immemorial.   Respected journals and periodicals report that “nothing” has changed over the past year on Wall Street since the financial collapse. Some make the staggering claim that it is back to “business as usual.” In other words, surprise of surprises, greed still exists - particularly in the world of money.

Yes, greed does exist and will continue to until a transformation of consciousness takes hold of us. In fact, in the last year of our “Lord”- the Money God that is - a lot has changed.

Firstly, there is a growing recognition of the part that unbridled greed played in the destruction of venerable old firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns within the financial industry itself. AIG and Merrill Lynch exist in some form or other, but limp along as lifeless shadows of their former greatness.
Contrary to popular belief, most people on the Street, from top levels of high finance through the middle and bottom layers too, know that their coworkers are responsible in large part for the capitulation of a once celebrated -now vilified-free market business model. Too little, too late, they lament. We should have seen it coming.

Along with this private acknowledgement is the conviction that it won’t happen again-not on their watch anyway.

Perhaps ironically, much of the Street feels similarly to the public in one major area: the government did not do its job to oversee and regulate the safety and protections of the marketplace.  This is undisputedly true.

In 2002, after the World Com and Enron debacles, Free Market architect Alan Greenspan accurately stated that ”an infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community.” He was referring, of course, to the copycat “creative accounting” rules for major shareholder companies that subsequently declared bankruptcy, bringing investors down with them.

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