The first writer of the long-awaited Wall Street sequel on how the greatest minds in finance envisioned the new Gordon Gekko—and how wrong they turned out to be.
The most startling single sentence I’ve ingested during the last startling month or so appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on September 22. Noting the decision by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to become traditional bank holding companies instead of pure investment banks, the Journal announced, “With the move, Wall Street as it has long been known…will cease to exist.”
Um, wow. I’ve got to wonder what they’re going to be calling that nice newspaper of theirs from now on. But that’s their problem. I have worries of my own—not least the movie I spent the last year writing for Twentieth Century-Fox. It’s the sequel to Wall Street. Yep, the terrific 1987 film that Oliver Stone directed, featuring the now-legendary Gordon Gekko, the role for which Michael Douglas won a richly deserved Academy Award. You know: “Greed is good.” It’s called Money Never Sleeps.
Gordon Gekko would be well aware of the bubble-and-pop cycle that has been the story of international business since at least the nineteenth century.
Oh, I hasten to add that I have now moved on from Money Never Sleeps, and it from me. When I turned in my final draft on July 22, the world was a very different place, and in the ensuing months, my screenplay’s fate has lurched with the markets. I’m certain my former masters at Fox will find a way to make a Wall Street sequel for a planet on which Wall Street has ceased to exist, and I wish them every success. They’ll do a great job. (I imagine they’ll begin, as is the custom, by rewriting my script, starting with “Fade In.”) But I’m on to the next. Still, I keep thinking of the many months I spent researching, and how little that research predicted the scorched earth we now find ourselves circumnavigating.
What was Wall Street—before it ceased to exist, I mean? Certainly something very different from what it was when the first film came out. During the last decade or so, it has gone global, forcing me to do the same. I conducted my research in New York, London, and Dubai and I let my screenplay hopscotch to the former Soviet republics and China as well. In the new plutocracy I was discovering, Russian oligarchs, Emirati sheiks, and Macao gambling barons bestrode the markets along with the expected hedge fund gods and those once-mighty Ozymandiases known as investment bankers. Now, of course, the waves are engulfing them all.
As I conceived him, Gordon Gekko would be well aware of the bubble-and-pop cycle that has been the story of international business since at least the nineteenth century—and particularly of the panics and disasters in the two decades since the first Wall Street: Black Monday in October, 1987; Black Wednesday in 1992; the bond rout in 1994; the Asian collapse in 1997; the implosion of Russia and of Long Term Capital Management, both in 1998; the tech collapse in 2000; the post-9/11 collapse in 2001. Given such real-world uncertainty even in the best of times, what, I wondered, would Gekko do? Wouldn’t he try to find some means of transcending such gyrations, of securing a pot of gold whose value wouldn’t depend so entirely on the fickleness of markets?
But whenever I asked this very question, all anyone wanted to talk about was hedge funds. Bankers wanted to talk about hedge funds. Oligarchs wanted to talk about hedge funds. Journalists wanted to talk about hedge funds. Understandably. No one really comprehended what a hedge fund was or how it worked, but everyone knew that the people who ran them became incredibly rich incredibly quickly, and they suspected that whatever that legerdemain might be, watching it on the big screen had to be fun. Weren’t hedge funders the Gordon Gekkos of today?
Well, maybe. I hung around with a lot of hedge fund people, spent time on their trading floors, watched them work. All of them knew who Gordon Gekko was, and they all had thoughts about what he’d be doing in 2008. He’d be buying Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull. He’d sleep on a yacht, the way Gianni Agnelli used to do. He’d be an activist hedge funder, purchasing companies and managing them aggressively for a few years to make them more profitable, then selling them. He’d do a PIPE—a private investment in public equity—to get on an important board, and then he’d take over. He’d get involved with opium farmers in Afghanistan. With casino hotels in Macao. He’d own an auction house, like Sotheby’s or Christie’s. (No one ventured that he’d be flat broke.)
John P. Avlon is the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics. He writes a weekly column for The Daily Beast and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he served as Chief Speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun.
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow at The Nation Institute, whose book, Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books), is forthcoming in Spring 2009. Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
Kevin Buckley was a reporter and Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek between 1968 and 1972. He is the author of Panama—The Whole Story (Simon & Schuster, 1991). He is a contributing editor of Playboy and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Michael O'Hanlon specializes in national security policy at the Brookings Institution. He is senior author of the Iraq Index. As a defense budget analyst, he advised members of Congress on military spending.
Abby Ellin regularly writes the "Vows" column for the New York Times, and previously wrote the "Preludes" column for that newspaper about young people and money. Her work has appeared in a range of publications, including Time, Marie Claire, More, Self and Glamour. She is the author of Teenage Waistland, but her greatest claim to fame is naming “Karamel Sutra” ice cream for Ben and Jerry's.
Stephen Schiff is a screenwriter whose work includes Lolita, True Crime, Unfaithful, and Leatherheads (the latter two uncredited). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Distinguished Criticism, Schiff was a staff writer at The New Yorker for nine years and was Vanity Fair’s critic-at-large. He has also been film critic of National Public Radio's Fresh Air, The Atlantic, and Glamour; a correspondent on CBS-TV's West 57th; and a contributor to The New York Times.
Stephen Schiff is a screenwriter whose work includes Lolita, True Crime, Unfaithful, and Leatherheads (the latter two uncredited). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Distinguished Criticism, Schiff was a staff writer at The New Yorker for nine years and was Vanity Fair’s critic-at-large. He has also been film critic of National Public Radio's Fresh Air, The Atlantic, and Glamour; a correspondent on CBS-TV's West 57th; and a contributor to The New York Times.
Good stuff
Interestingly, I think the film will be waaaaay more interesting now that everything has gone to shit. Let's see GG deal with losing his shirt...
Unwilling to "pay tribute" to Gordon Gekko's shameless idea of what is good.
Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the "wonder boys" on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and the fully expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.
Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of human community's banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the "brightest and best" among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing, and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.
How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that monumental arrogance, grotesque greed and a disgraceful culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.
Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth have been recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
These self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have duplicitously "manufactured" a sub prime "asset bubble" and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the global economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The sub prime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is moving upward for the moment.
Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling {ie, deleveraging} of the worldwide sub prime swindle, are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that thirty percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Is the economy being administered by unscrupulous bookies dressed in pin-striped suits? Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The "bankstas" among us evidently think so.
In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a "trickle down" economy. We have been repeatedly told how this 'rational' economic scheme is good because it "raises all ships." And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The 'ships' carrying these billions of less fortunate people {ie, more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth} do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Interesting! But Gordon Gekko is not a buy and hold kind of guy. If he's smart enough to recognize the bubble cycle, he'd be smart enough to get in, take his profits, and get out. The better movie occurs at the point when he realizes that his actions and the actions of those like him can scuttle the economy. In the first movie, he really believes that greed is good for the economy. How would he respond when that whole value system is challenged? Would he maintain that what is happening in the economy will be ultimately good for it? Would he change his position? He's also 20 years older--how would that affect his thinking? This, to me, would make a much more interesting movie.
Remembering clearly the scene where Gekko's daughter explains what her Daddy does for a living - picking up the crumbs from the cake - I wonder what the hedgefood folks would do with that analogy. Squeezing the lemon 'til it's dry?
I also remember Gekko's art collection, which might have been the finest thing about him and his lifestyle. Now we have Damien Hirst's diamond skull, a worthless piece of pretension as art, but a very valuable bauble.
Has art been kicked to the curb on the way to satisfying a lust for "value?" Oh God! Will our immortal souls survive the coming inundating wave? Let's hope not: it will be much better to cleanse the pallet and start all over again, hopefully without Gekko's boat rising.
This week has been very interesting for me.
In all the years that you grow up and struggle with who you are , what you should or will be like, what you like, what you don't,
eventually, if you're stable, you grasp some theories as a working model and hopefully it sustains you through your life.
Well what happened to me, when like Alan Greenspan, I did not perceive the FLAW IN MY MODEL. Greenspan was touted as one of our most brilliant economists and ran the Federal Reserve for what, 19 years? And was one of the causes of the ECONOMIC CRASH.
BUT THE IMPORTANT THING IS THE FLAW.
WHAT'S THE FLAW?
IT IS THE BELIEF THAT "'FREE ENTERPRISE, CAPITALISM WORKS"
And almost every day, I say or argue or debate something supporting 'capitalism' as the contradiction to or against socialism.
THEN I CATCH MYSELF. CAPITALISM HAS JUST PROVEN IT DOESN'T WORK.
I'm talking 'pure' Ayn Rand level of Capitalism.
So when I see arguments that Obamma is against FREE ENTERPRISE I don't blame him.
What you can blame him about is that he's heading for SOCIALISM WHICH WE KNOW DOESN'T WORK TOO.
So if Capitalism morphs to a REGULATED FORM THAT ISN'T SOCIALISM, THAT WOULD BE GOOD
As long as it it doesn't become DICTATORSHIP, OLIGARCHY.,
I AM AWAITING CAPITALISM's REPLACEMENT.
BUT IT NEEDS A NEW NAME
HOW ABOUT "PROFONESTISM" ?
(A THEORY OF ECONOMICS BASED ON PROFITABLE HONESTY?)
Terrific piece.
On the matter of bankrupting the human family's global economy.
It appears intellectual dishonesty is but one of the perverse ways in which old, out of touch leaders in my not-so-great generation are bankrupting the family of humanity.
Please note the way ideologically-driven leadership is providing ample evidence of being morally bankrupt and spiritually vacuous.
Unbridled greed and institutionalized fraud by mortgagors of our childrens' future are leading to decay within the financial system and threatening to ruin the real global economy.
Many too many economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians are besmirching our honor and degrading the value of rational authority.
As I recall the course of human events, never in history have a few million stupendously rich people but otherwise bankrupt people stolen, consumed and hoarded so much of Earth's resource base, come what may for billions of other people in the human family who happen to be less fortunate. That a tiny minority of rich and powerful people have been so unfairly and inequitably rewarded by an economic scheme favoring their wanton avarice, is no longer a set of circumstances which can be concealed by the refusals of the mainstream media to bring up this situation for open discussion..... or by our collusive silence.
Thankfully, a new day is dawning.
A culture that defines its very raison d'etre by endless accumulation of material possessions; by the unbounded acquisition of more money, money, money, money; by recklessly overconsuming and relentlessly hoarding limited resources, demonstrably declares to all the world that greed is good.
Are we not members of a culture that worships consumerism? Are the products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?
Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeur, private jets, McMansions, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs...... all signatures of success in a culture borne of the 'goodness' of greed?
Consider for a moment what greed has wrought.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Dear Friends,
Perhaps you can assist me. There must be something wrong with the "picture" I am about to draw, but no one with wealth, power, status, and privileges to conspicuously consume and endlessly hoard has said anything. Their bought-and-paid-for politicians and absurdly enriched minions in the mass media are also silent.
Picture this:
A remarkably tiny group of conniving, deceitful, ostentatiously greedy, patently fraudulent financial schemers on what is left of Wall Street in the remaining investment houses and the major {stress-tested} banks that are described as "too big to fail" are at one and the same time being given hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, racking up billions of dollars in profits, and paying themselves millions of dollars in bonuses. All the while, millions of people are losing their livelihoods, homes, pensions, etc.
What is wrong with this picture?
Sincerely,
Steve
Among the bought-and-paid-for politicians in Washington, DC, the Greedy Boys of Greenwich and the Wonder Boys of Wall Street, is there one human being in this "Axis of Arrogance and Greed" who will speak out for something other than their own selfish interests?
Who is going to stand up and speak out clearly, loudly and often as President Barack Obama is doing?
Many voices are needed now.
How is the family of humanity to sensibly organize to respond ably to the human folly, avarice and stupidity that is now being consciously perpetrated by those few million greedy people who possess a lion's share of the world's wealth and the power it purchases? After all, a tiny minority is primarily responsible for the Earth being ravaged and threatened as a fit place for habitation by our children.
When are the morally bankrupt, super-rich Masters of the Universe among us to be held to account for having disgracefully institutionalized the 'goodness' of their pathological arrogance, conspicuous consumption and excessive hoarding for the benefit of none others than themselves and minions? For many too many economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians
short-term financial gains, power accrual, economic expediency and political convenience have directed their thought and behavior.
Perhaps it is time for many ordinary people not only to deploy these words from Mohandas Gandhi, "Be the change you wish to see in the world", but also to live out this great man's example of principled, peaceful, refusal to submit to arrogant, dishonest, avaricious and dishonorable authority that is relentlessly degrading Earth's frangible environment and recklessly dissipating Earth's limited resources in our time.
Perhaps honesty, more transparency, constructive personal action, accountability and necessary social change are in the offing.
Scientists have a duty to warn and to inform; leaders of the family of humanity have a responsibility to act with moral courage and a willingness to do the right thing. At least some scientists appear to be doing their duty. Except for a precious few, great human beings like President Barack Obama, the human community appears to be virtually bereft of adequate leaders.
Thank you.
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