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 happens to be LaBeouf's future father-in-law, a dad to LaBeouf's on-screen fiancée, Carey Mulligan) (Zeitchik, 2010).
Greed seems to be Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps theme, reckless and over the top risky behaviour has lead to the bubble in the housing prices to burst due to the actions of Wall Street firms. Shia Labouf played by Jake Moore works for the Lehman Brothers-esque Keller Zabel and is mentored by managing director Lewis Zabel. He receives a bonus of $1,450,000, before a late-night treasury meeting, which reveals that Keller Zabel is on the verge of collapse. This brings up an important ethical issue on how much bankers and traders receive in bonuses, irrelevant of the financial climate. After the collapse of several large banks during the financial crises of 2008, many are still paying their employees substantial bonuses. Many argue that the UK government have pumped billions of pounds into the banking sector, and has bailed out both Royal Bank of Scotland and Loyds Banking Group. As a result they should have greater say in how much the banks pay out in bonuses, however the banks argue that they cannot dramatically reduce bonuses without the risk of losing top staff to banks based overseas, which are under less
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