The background of the story
The film is talking about Jordan Belfort (Leonard DiCaprio starred) ran a stock brokerage firm called Stratton Oakmont that defrauded investors in 90s, this is one of the most famous business fraud scandals in wall street and he is known as “Wolf of Wall Street”. The company running the business by buying penny stocks with some secrets accounts, they hired salesmen to do the cold calls and persuaded them to buy their stocks that could make many profit to them. After many clients bought the penny stocks so that the price of stock rose, they would dump the stocks they had bought. They earned a lot of money from this while their clients lost their investments from stocks crashed. By running this defrauded business, the firm became bigger and bigger and hired more and more salesmen. After few years, Belfort and his partners had to do money laundering in order to solve the problem of their huge dirty money from fraud. They saved their money in Swiss bank accounts and found people to laundry their money. Finally, the unethical business was discovered by FBI and the firm was shut down by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Belfort was arrested by FBI for money laundering and securities fraud.
The problems of business ethics
First, we think Belfort had problems of his behaviors in term of Virtue theory. It could show us he was unethical on his actions. People need moral virtues such as honesty, respect and trustworthiness. However, Belfort deceived their clients to invest in their film, some of them even spent all the savings of their lives. However, Belfort and his salesmen made bad financial advices intentionally to invest some stocks that they knew would let them lose all their money, as the price would crash at the end. They apparently failed to be trustworthy people and had never respected all their clients who paid trust, money and hopes to them; even they had never thought their clients as human being