Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lee R. Raymond

Nothing lands quite like a corporate elder diagnosing greed as a sudden outbreak, as if it were weather and not business model. Lee R. Raymond frames Wall Street’s excess as the “old human frailty,” a phrase that does heavy moral work: it relocates the cause from incentives and institutions to timeless psychology. That move is strategic. If greed is perennial, then any crisis becomes a story about personal virtue lapsing, not about deregulation, compensation structures, or the way risk gets outsourced and repackaged until nobody feels responsible.

The line “in this country” performs a subtle patriotic narrowing. It suggests a shared national disappointment, a fall from an implied standard, while keeping the critique safely general. Raymond doesn’t name a product, a bank, a policy, or a boardroom practice; he names an urge. That abstraction lets him sound candid without becoming accusatory in a way that could implicate peers, clients, or the broader corporate ecosystem.

His most pointed subtext sits in the word “only.” The problem isn’t self-interest per se; it’s self-interest without the alibi of public benefit. He’s invoking an older capitalist ethic: profit is tolerable when it can be narrated as service, innovation, jobs. “To the detriment of everyone else” turns a market failure into a civic offense, borrowing the language of harm and community to reassert a boundary that finance, in boom times, loves to erase.

Context matters: spoken in the shadow of financial scandal and crisis-era anger, this reads as an attempt to offer moral clarity while limiting structural culpability. It’s contrition that stops just short of reform.