MAY 10 — “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit,” so said Gordon Gecko, the greedy anti-hero of that classic 80s movie Wall Street. 

This isn’t the exactly the morality most of us were raised with but it’s not entirely false.  

Certainly, in the capitalist and money-oriented world we all live in greed is essential. 

If all of us or the vast majority of us weren’t hungry to earn and consume, many economies would fail. 

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However, greed is also dangerous and unfettered greed can be truly deadly. 

Yet, today, even during a pandemic that should be giving people a broader perspective on what’s important, we see greed writ large.

No, I don’t mean the guys hoarding toilet paper and trying to flog it for a profit. No that is your everyday greed. 

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I mean rather the amazing and special greed of the oligarchs, moneymen and market makers who constitute the very top of the global financial order. 

The 1 per cent or really the 0.1 per cent of the world’s population who control perhaps 15 to 20 per cent of global GDP.   

Jeff Bezos alone, for example, is worth over US$140 billion (RM606 billion) — more than the GDP of Morocco, a middle-income nation of 30 million people.  

That’s also almost half the GDP of Singapore... and this is a single man. 

Bezos may officially be the richest but there’s no reason to single him out. 

There are plenty of other billionaires, known and hidden, and all manner of banks and institutions that support and profit from their wealth. 

Here, we see people with sufficient money to live comfortably for 100 if not 1,000 lifetimes and yet they are continually engaged in making more money.  

The man with 10 billion who wants another 50 billion, the people with 50 billion who want a 100 billion etc.  

This is unfettered greed and it sits at the heart of the world economy.  

Its most visible incarnation, of course, is Gordon Gecko’s home turf — Wall Street itself. Home of the New York Stock Exchange where trillions of stocks and shares are traded daily. 

Here surrounded by thousands of Covid-19 deaths and legions of unemployed are markets that have risen over the past 12 months. 

The world economy has come to a standstill. Two hundred and fifty thousand people world-wide have died of this pandemic, US unemployment is touching a historic 15 per cent but on a 52-week basis, the Nasdaq index of US stocks is up.   

The people who own these shares or a good cross section of them are richer than ever before. 

When the economy is good, shares go up and the ultra-wealthy benefit and when the economy is bad, the US government underwrites banks and corporations so shares don’t fall and neither does the wealth of the ultra-wealthy.  

Of course, anyone — certainly any American — can buy stocks but only the wealthy have access to the capital, the leverage, the advanced products that allow them to make or break markets and fortunes.  

Mass unemployment and deaths make no difference to them and even the performance of the companies on the market no longer matters that much.  

Uber, for example, just reported losses, layoffs, and a falling dividend but its share price soared. Tesla famously has scarcely ever made a profit, but it is worth hundreds of billions etc.  

Basically the money, the trillions circulating the markets — not just the stocks but the loans, the derivative products, the bonds and the money pumped by the US treasury into banks — has taken on a life of its own. Money makes more money.  

This cycle of crazy accumulation now appears to threaten the system itself. 

I’m not arguing for the end of capitalism. Capitalism — a system based on supply, demand and individual choice — has proven to be the best system humans have for allocating resources.  


In general, innovation and efficiency have been rewarded and poor decisions have been penalised. It is brutal but effective.

However, today this thesis is being undermined. We see banks and industries declared too big to fail and bailed out, and money flowing in the direction of big companies regardless of how they perform. 

Is pumping billions of dollars into a handful of big tech companies — Amazon or Google etc. — really going to provide us with the innovation we need to change a radically unequal world or address major issues like climate change?  

Again, I use Google as much as anyone else, but they seem to be sucking up an increasingly absurd amount of global capital.  

Just a tiny fraction of that money could propel start-ups in places like Indonesia or Kenya to astronomic heights. 

A tiny fraction of the investment in Tesla would have given entrepreneurs no less able than Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg in less fortunate parts of the world the chance to change their lives and the lives of the communities around them.  

But given the huge returns you can make investing in the world’s biggest companies, why would you bother funding little start-ups in poorer parts of the world? 

Basically the market via the forces of fear and greed should lead us to the efficient distribution of the world’s resources but that system appears to have broken down and if it isn’t fixed eventually, the consequences will be far worse than a virus.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.