I am a former financial reporter for the New York Times, with over twenty years experience covering finance at home and abroad. I have written about the Internet bust, Enron/corporate scandals, the mortgage meltdown, the sovereign debt crisis, and countless emerging market dramas. But, from the outset, what really interested me as a reporter on the money beat were the personalities, outsize personalities. Hedge fund titans. CEOs. Private equity kingpins. Crusading prosecutors. Scheming investment bankers. Money managers of all stripes. Bond kings. And many others. Some flew high, others crashed spectacularly but in all of them I saw a common condition. They all wanted something beyond what they had.
Mammon led them on is a John Milton line from Paradise Lost. And while those who follow this devil of covetousness have rifled the bowels of their Mother earth for treasures better hid, Mammon, as I see it, speaks to that ache.
Here is how Eugene Henderson, the tormented pig farmer in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, puts it:
Now I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it got even stronger. It said only one thing, I want, I want! And I would ask, 'What do you want?' But this was all it would ever tell me. It never said a thing except I want, I want, I want.
