Karina Barrymore: In the end the great leveller is greed

In her final column as she signs off from a stellar 30-year career as a financial journalist, Karina Barrymore looks at that great leveller: the desire to have more, more, and even more.

Many people fall victim to the money trap.

It broke my heart and made me angry all in the same phone call this week as I listened to a reader tell me how he had lost his life’s savings to a cryptocurrency fraud.

Sad because not only will he never recover financially from this loss, but he will also have to live with the repercussions.

Instead of having $800,000 to budget during retirement, he will now spend his retirement on the borderline of poverty — despite more than 40 years of savings.

But the impact goes much deeper than just this gullible (his word) victim’s impact; it also touches his immediate family and the next generations of his family.

There will be no relaxed retirement lifestyle, there will be no “helping out” the kids or the grandkids and there will be no inheritance.

A cryptocurrency fraud cost one reader his life savings.

In fact, his children may have to contribute to his later years, instead of him having the independent life he had planned for himself.

And angry, because too many people — tens of thousands of people are conned every year because of their own greed.

Greed? Yes, greed.

It might sound harsh but all the excuses, or “I didn’t knows”, still boil down to the desire for more: More money, more power, more social standing. More.

During my 30 years as a finance journalist I can confidently say there has not been a scam or fraud that has not been based on appealing to someone’s greed.

Nothing has changed since my very first day on the job reporting on the 1987 sharemarket crash, which was immediately followed by the junk bond bash, the Asian crisis, the dotcom bubble, the tech wreck, the global financial crisis and now a threatening cryptocurrency crisis.

These are global scams and frauds but their size does not matter, and they are no different to the scam used on my caller this week.

On Wall Street, many regard greed as a virtue.

The common theme is greed.

Think about the neighbour who talked his friends into the latest pyramid investment scheme.

He told them it was easy money, right?

Or the romance scams. The victims thought they could take the easy route and buy love.

Or the self-managed superannuation scams, lured in by being in “control” or getting early access to their super money.

Or the investment training courses that graduate their victims with A+ results, then offer exclusive access to unique trading platforms to make lots of money.

However, the biggest and most unforgivable scam during the past 30 years has come from our banks and their networks of financial planners.

Their victims were truly greedless and blameless.

They put their trust and their futures in the hands of so-called professionals and got bad and corrupt advice.

As I sign off from journalism with this final Your Hip Pocket column, it is the crimes of our corporate and political leaders that allowed these bank scams to happen that stand out as the most shocking.

Thank you to all my contacts who trusted me with their information and to my loyal readers and those who challenged me every week.

It is only through inquiry and debate that we can learn and grow.