GDP growth remains a national priority for most nations. The world’s economies remain fixated on money accumulation, market expansion, and the speculator’s code to buy low, sell high, and take profits. All of this is largely unquestioned, the ideology prevails that greed is good, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the financial centers of New York and London. Gigantic companies trade stocks, bonds, and derivatives in multitrillion-dollar batches in organized exchanges where the practice of speculation thrives. Large pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and insurance companies are the institutional players in high-stakes gambling, collecting money from a broad base of the population and using it to play the markets. Staggering sums are swept together into a colossal mass —a greed-infected cloud of hot money—that rises and settles around the world while trolling for opportunities to maximize investor returns. And wherever the cloud settles, instability and crises follow, creating genuine hardship and economic ruin of ever greater magnitudes. This cloud continues to menace, yet is given a free pass to move wherever it is drawn to quick profit, as if it were perfectly normal part of the global economy. What has made this possible is a perfect storm of technological, cultural, and political developments since the early 1990s. Desktop computing and internet technology allow for far greater amounts of money to be pulled together at the speed of light. Along with that has also come a shift in cultural attitudes about greed.

Market populism

Prior to the early 1990s, the unseemly side of greed was still being noticed in popular film and literature. Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, Wall Street, epitomizes the so-called “greed decade” of the 1980s in the cold-heartedness of the investment banking industry and the damage to working people that is brought about by corporate mergers and acquisitions. Similar themes were captured in books such as Liar’s Poker (1989) by Michael Lewis, who relates a personal reflection on the reckless bond-trading industry; Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (1989) by investigative journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, who chronicle the notorious leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco; and James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves (1992) exposé of insider-trading scandals. Social satirist and novelist Martin Amis conveys the decadence of late-capitalist Western society in Money (1984) and London Fields (1989).