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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Wall Street still Wall Street 30 years after classic movie

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Thirty years after the release of the now-classic movie “Wall Street,” Wall Street itself is totally different. Or it hasn’t changed at all, depending on who you ask.

To mark the Dec. 11 anniversary of the opening of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, which starred Michael Douglas in an Oscar-winning, career-defining role as corporate raider Gordon Gekko, The Associated Press spoke to a group of Wall Street professionals, writers and film experts about how the movie reflected the reality of the financial world, and how little or much that world has changed in the decades since the movie’s release.

“The culture is the same. It’s all driven by greed. You don’t go into any of these businesses if you want to save the world or save puppies. It’s all about making money. If anything, I think the enormous explosion of wealth since then has made people greedier.” — Michael Lewitt, investment manager and former trader at Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment firm that was prosecuted for illegal activities in the junk bond market and later filed for bankruptcy.

The movie “dramatized the ethical and moral collapse of high finance during the Reagan Era. Regrettably, Gordon Gecko, Stone’s iconic symbol of unrestrained greed, would undoubtedly thrive in today’s madcap bull market. Indeed, we might even put him in the White House.” — Raymond Arsenault, John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg and author of “Stoned on Wall Street: The Stockbroker’s Son and the Decade of Greed.”

“The movie ‘Wall Street’ accurately depicted the industry as the Wild West, a winner-take-all environment where, in the words of Gordon Gekko, ‘greed is good.’ Whether the result of a couple of market meltdowns, the regulatory environment or public scrutiny, Wall Street has become kinder and gentler.” — Jack Ablin, chief investment strategist for BMO Capital Markets.

“That movie is probably as relevant today as it was then. Things change, the markets change, but the attitudes of, for instance, Wall Street and corporate executives treating the average person as a pawn on a chessboard — I think that concept has not changed very much, and is still widely held.” — Charles Geisst, Professor of finance at Manhattan College and author of the 1997 book “Wall Street: A History.”

“My take on ‘Wall Street,’ just like my take on ‘The Wolf of Wall Street,’ is that these things are overhyped, which you would expect in a movie. In my reality, while I may have lived through many parts of that movie … those episodes are a very small part of what actually happens.” — Scott Wren, senior global equity strategist for Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

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