KEY POINTS:
Greed might be down but it is not out. Greed is never out. There is a case to be made that greed got the world into this financial mess and only greed will get us through it. Fear sure as hell won't.
Investor extraordinaire Warren Buffett made exactly
that point in the New York Times last week.
In his impassioned plea to investors he explained why he is getting back into the market.
The time for fear is when everyone else is being greedy, he said. The time for greed is when everyone else is fearful.
Buffett, like many market players, sees no shame in talking about greed as a virtue.
To many investors it is a valid motivating force.
Certainly it can be abhorrent when allowed to run rampant, and without strict guidelines.
Even the dullest of hippies can, to guilt-inducing effect, juxtapose the multi-million dollar pay cheques of Wall St bankers with the dollar or less so many humans live on each day.
But what is truly abhorrent to those who see greed as a driver of human endeavour is not the scale of the rewards but the failure to perform at a level which warrants them.
When these two points disconnect - as they seem to have done on Wall St in the past few years - then the system has failed.
If Bear Stearns, Lehman and others were still delivering double digit profits to shareholders and healthy returns to those who invested in their products, then the moral outrage about bonuses and salaries would be blunted - at least from the business world.
The same can be said of the anger in New Zealand this week about Contact Energy directors.
Of that board's most serious opponents - the likes of Bruce Sheppard and Brian Gaynor - the problem was with the performance of the directors, not the remuneration in and of itself.
Greed is about aspiring to own more than you need to survive - an excessive desire for food or wealth, says the dear old Concise Oxford. And excess always sounds bad.
But without the concept of excess, would we have a concept of what it means to exceed? Exceeding expectations is what human progress is all about.
It was an excess of food that allowed the earliest humans to move from hunter-gatherer societies to villages and towns. It allowed humans to begin trading and allowed for the division of labour. Without excess wealth, a society has little capacity to support art, music or even religion.
The meltdown of Wall St has ended an era where greed went unchallenged. No doubt there was an excess of excess. So much so that the numbers became meaningless.
But however much political thinking now swings towards regulating wealth creation, that doesn't render the desire to create wealth redundant.
In the modern world we understand the importance of environmental issues and human rights. There is a place for a board to ensure a company makes its profits from within socially acceptable parameters. If nothing else, they should see that society as made up of their customers.
But the primary purpose of a board of directors is to ensure that the corporate machine remains focused on creating wealth - excess wealth - the more the better from a shareholder point of view.
So to banish greed from the boardroom would be foolish. But greed must be functional. If it is motivating directors or executives to reward themselves but not motivating them to deliver acceptable returns then it serves no purpose. At that point shareholders have a right to express their outrage and boards have an obligation to listen.
Right now fear and an aversion to risk have frozen global markets and threaten to stall economic growth.
But it won't last. It might be leaner, meeker, milder and all the better for it, but greed will be back.
Liam Dann is the Herald's business editor.
