[Combined Edition] Human Greed Never Grows Old? A Review of the Film 'Wall Street'! (Yoon Ssen x Managing Director Al)
- What to look for
- Following key scenes in Wall Street offers a look at securities-industry practices such as cold calling, winning orders, spreading rumors, and shareholder meetings, as well as the debate over greed.
- Why it matters
- Understanding the value of information and how markets operate helps connect and interpret events in the film alongside real-world financial news.
AI summary
Yoon Jo-ho and Managing Director Al watch Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street together and explain the realities of the securities industry. They introduce the film as a symbolic starting point of the era of financial capitalism that drew Ivy League elites to Wall Street and gave rise to the famous line “Greed is good.” They explain brokers' everyday cold calling in the 80s and the New York Stock Exchange's trading-pit system, and examine how the protagonist picks up nonpublic information from his father, an airline union leader. They single out the scene in his first meeting with Gekko where a mention of Bluestar catches Gekko's attention as a textbook example of profitable information and persuasion. Through his first order and reward, and the process of moving stock prices through surveillance and rumor-spreading, they explain how markets operate and the power of narratives. They follow, in sequence, the crossing of legal boundaries and accelerating greed, the betrayal involving the breakup and sale of Bluestar, revenge through solidarity with the union, and the arrest, recording, and trial. They conclude with an overall assessment that the underlying essentials are unchanging human desires and the rules of the market. All directional outlooks are the speakers' conditional judgments, not definitive predictions of short-term prices.