The power of the story of the Hobbit lies in the creature Smaug, the dragon who sleeps underneath piles of gold coins and other tokens of wealth. In the movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug you witness the awakening of a malignant and destructive power, its vindictive anger, and its unleashing to roam the planet with the vulnerable Laketown its first target. At the end of the movie, Bilbo Baggins watches Smaug bearing down on Laketown and moans, “What have we done?”

Now I see Smaug everywhere, ranging from an awakening beast to a monster in full-flame destroying the vulnerable merely for lying in its path. In the New York Times this morning I find the ruins of Smaug’s desolation in Mong La, Myanmar, the victim of “China’s insatiable demand for tiger and leopard parts, beer bile and pangolin’s . . .” (January 24, 2015)

In New York’s Aqueduct Raceway horses are put at risk to fill the race card for the high rollers at Resorts World Casino. “The booming casino’s gambling revenues have inflated the racetrack’s purses, heightening the lure for owners and trainers to put horses at risk.” The fatality rate at Aqueduct has reached four times the national average (7.8 per 1000 horses) as “heedless owners put unproven horses at risk for lucrative purses” (New York Times, January 24, 2015)

In a more subtle loosening of the reins on greed, a three-judge panel of New York’s Appeals court overturned the convictions of Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson, two hedge-fund managers who were tried together for insider trading in 2012. The ruling is significant, because the judges questioned the criteria for proving that benefits were received by the informants, potentially undermining the convictions of many more other hedge-fund violators. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan is asking the judges to revisit their decision.

But Wall Street is nothing if not subtle, so the slightest moderating of enforcement against insider trading opens the gates of cascading gold from the hedge-fund managers to informants and back. Greed on Wall Street is the dragon fully alert, ready to plunder at a moment’s notice.

There are differences in exploitation between China and Wall Street, but the message of The Hobbit is that the most explosive greed begins with innocent probing. Bilbo enters the dragon’s lair on an innocent mission to restore a gem to its rightful owners, but once awake, the dragon has no limits. He will destroy his own home belching fire, rather than allow the liberation of a single token of his wealth.

“Greed is good,” avowed Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, another parable of overreach and destruction. Gekko is a caricature, who represents many thousands who are willing to exploit for advantage and he lurks like the dragon in every trader’s heart. Only if we know that innocence can turn to raging greed in an instant, are we prepared to meet the dragon. And the dragon is everywhere.