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Old February 12th, 2012 #1
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Finally got around to this. The thread that just kept my interest was the recent financial crisis, fictionalized as the collapse of aggressive, highly leveraged Keller Zabel (Lehman-Bear Stearns composite?) by the sinister design of its more established, politically connected rival Churchill Schwartz (clearly Goldman Sachs). What the movie gets right is the changed context. In the original, hostile takeovers could still be contrasted with remnants of the old economy: the men who built the airline that provided good blue collar jobs for honest family men like Martin Sheen’s character. By the time of the sequel, the frame of reference for the 2008 financial scandal is the 1986 financial scandal. And Stone implies that there’s a fine line between legally actionable insider trading of the Gekko-Boesky variety and the everyday business of Wall Street’s proprietary trading desks. The former is based on facts not available to the general public, the latter on rumors not available to the general public.

Speaking of crime, the bailout negotiations take place in an ornate conference room in the fortress-like Federal Reserve Bank of NY building. Godfather fans will recognize that building as the setting of the pivotal meeting at which the Mafia Commission finds drug trafficking too lucrative to resist. Then again, they don’t consider the investment banking racket. In another coincidence, Eli Wallach borrows from his obsequious, treacherous Don Altobello (Godfather III) to play Jules Steinhardt, Churchill Schwartz’s crazy as a fox elder statesman (Sidney Weinberg back from the dead?; cf. arch-Zionist hedge fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt). Too bad jews don’t get their just desserts the way Italians do.

NY Fed:


Last edited by Mike Parker; February 12th, 2012 at 09:40 AM.
 
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bailout, financial speculation, goldman sachs, oliver stone, wall street

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