The road to disaster

GUEST COLUMN

Warren Buffet calls it calculated, Ivan Boesky, arbitrageur made famous by the 1987 movie Wall Street said its good, Catholicism considers it one among the top seven sins and environmentalists may call it a disease.

Greed means different things to different people. And speculation though considered the foundation stone of the capitalist society, in its extreme form, greed, can bring everything down.

"It does not take much to tip over to the other side, the cycle of human folly repeats," says Peter Hamilton, in his book, The Stock Market Barometer. The greatest essentials in the development of a nation, speculation leads to healthy risk taking.

However, pushed harder, the virtue loses its balance and moves to the other unbalancing extreme. Greed is defined as the selfish desire for or pursuit of money, wealth, power, food, or other possessions, especially when this denies the same object to others. So how does something so virtuous become so vicious?

People are mentioned as universally greedy, when they link emotionally with rising prices or potential increase in demand of a commodity. Greed clearly talks about attaching too much importance to money, possessing it as an end in itself rather than anything else.

Seeing money making in everything is an extreme imbalance. Martin Pring, market trainer explains in his book,