Project B: movie response

Global Financial Ethics – FIN6620

The movie response that will be covered in this essay will be on the film “Wall Street Money Never Sleeps ”. It was directed by Oliver Stone, released during 2010 and is the sequel to the 1987 film “Wall Street”. The film starts with the release from jail of Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko before cutting to a rather elaborate plot involving Shia LaBeouf as the young trader with (some) scruples, who's rising in a world that just happens to be collapsing at the same time, as investment banks run by the likes of Frank Langella and Josh Brolin teeter under the weight of the 2008 financial crisis. The story then carefully weaves in more and more to Gekko (who, conveniently, also …show more content…

This is called an Insider Ring.

The term “moral hazard” is mentioned several times throughout Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. It’s first mentioned during the treasury meeting, when they are deciding whether to bail out Keller Zabel, if they bail them out what’s to say it wont occur again. Moral hazard is the idea that an individual can alter their behaviour if they know they are insured against some of the outcomes, for example if a car is not insured you would take more care than if it was. The reason moral hazard comes up several times throughout the movie is because it’s often used within the context of banks and sub prime mortgages. This is due to the fact that before the 2008 financial crises sub prime mortgage lenders were making reckless lending decisions, they lent many mortgages to people who were unlikely to be able to pay them back. This led to large-scale mortgage defaulting, which caused many banks to go under and cause the economy to suffer. However many banks were bailed out by governments in order to reduce the economy suffering further, which is effectively rewarding them for bad economic decisions (What is Moral Hazard, 2007).

The issue of lack of corporate governance is apparent in the movie, its connected to the reasons why Keller Zabel and the other banks began to fail. A definition of Corporate Governance is a “set of relationships between a company’s