Greedy Bankers Are Like Coke Fiends (Seriously)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/148749/greedy_bankers_are_like_coke_fiends

AlterNet / By Tony Schwartz

Greedy Bankers Are Like Coke Fiends

November 4, 2010

"We can't control our greed," the CEO acknowledged, in a rare moment of candor and insight. "You should regulate us more."

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As Michael Lewis has written, "It's more than a little nuts for a man who has a billion dollars to devote his life to making another billion, but that's what some of our most exalted citizens do, over and over again."

Greed begins in the neurochemistry of the brain. What fuels our greed is a neurotransmitter called dopamine. The higher the dopamine levels in the brain, the more pleasure we experience. Cocaine, for example, directly increases dopamine levels. By using magnetic resonance imaging studies, the Harvard researcher Hans Breiter and his colleagues have found that the craving for money activates the same regions of the brain as the craving for cocaine, or sex, or any other instant and intense pleasure.

Dopamine is most reliably activated by novel stimuli -- meaning an experience we haven't had before. We crave recreating that experience. But here's the problem: If we snort the same amount of cocaine the next time, or earn the same sum of money, dopamine levels tend not to increase.

It wasn't money these architects of our demise were after, but rather the satisfaction and security they anticipated money would provide -- as it had after their first windfalls. When the rush began to diminish over time, the solution they landed on was to up the ante - dramatically.

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It's a pattern that helps explain why Angelo Mozilo, then CEO of Countrywide, would allow his employees to write tens of thousands of home mortgages he knew were likely to default, while selling off his shares in the company as fast as he could, before their inevitable crash. Or why Steven Rattner, the politically connected founder of the Quadrangle Group, who hoped to someday become Treasury Secretary, would trash his career by making kickbacks to public officials so that he could add a few more million dollars to the several hundred million he already had.

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Throughout Inside Job, bankers justify their greedy, dishonest, and destructive behaviors the same way all addicts do: by hemming and hawing, rationalizing and minimizing, denying and dissembling. A cocaine addict plainly does damage to himself and to those closest to him. What's so frightening about those with an addiction to money (and skill at accumulating it) is that the cost can be so great to so many.

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[HCE SuiGeneris]

1. Net recommendation: +6 votes (Your vote: +1)

:dem:

[Thav]

2. Are you sure some bankers

AREN'T coke fiends?

[Hissyspit]

3. Well, there's that, too.