ABSTRACT
Greed, or avarice, is the need to acquire money, material wealth, and a position in power structures based on wealth. In the 1990s we experienced an acceleration of possibilities to earn material wealth. We were caught up in it, and ``more'' was regarded as a constant factor; experts envisioned a permanent growth of scale measured in percentages. In the wake of the largest ®nancial crisis since the 1930s, we might ask how we started to think like that, and why did governments and ®nancial institutions operate on this assumption? Or, in Alan Greenspan's words to the US Senate:
Why did corporate governance checks and balances that served us reasonably well in the past break down? At root was the rapid growth in stock market capitalizations in the latter part of the 1990s that arguably engendered an outsized increase in opportunities for avarice. An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community.55
