In the recently released movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps by Oliver Stone, the idea of greed was candidly addressed. The prequel to this film, also by the same name, allowed the main character Gordon Gekko to make the simple statement, “Greed…is good.” He was referring to the economic benefit of having people constantly pushing for more and more, eliminating inefficiencies and allowing our economy to reach never before seen potentials. This original Wall Street movie, which was released in the mid eighties, was met with cheers at a Berkley Business Administration graduation ceremony speech, for its ideas of supposed economic health.
However, as an economics teacher of mine once said, ”Whenever rapid growth or inflation occurs in an economy, unfortunately recession is always soon to follow.” That idea is reflective in the basic laws of our world. It follows Newton’s third law, stating that whenever there is a force it is always accompanied with a reaction force of equal magnitude in the opposite direction. As we continue to force our economy to grow at impractical rates, we are met with that equal and opposite force pushing us back. This is evident in a quick glance of our history of economic inflations and recessions in the US.
Greed is the main cause for continuing to push for more and more, far beyond necessity. The movie Wall Street portrays a man by the name of Bretton James as a hedge fund manager in great financial success. He is later on convicted of insider trading between his company and a smaller company that he anonymously owns. A board manager questions his reasoning and Bretton is without an answer. Why would someone well into his millions, if not billions of dollars risk going to jail simply for trying to double or triple his fortune? Greed can be the only answer before insanity. Greed is nothing more than a disease in our modern world, allowing families to buy homes well above practical limits, companies to depend on unnecessary rising stock prices, and our economy to constantly swing like a pendulum in and out of recession and inflation.
James, Michael S. "Is Greed Ever Good?" ABC News/Money (2002). Web. 1 Oct. 2010.
