Throughout the past few decades our country has been witness to catastrophic economic retractions. In the 1980’s we watched as mortgage bonds took over the market, opening up a new world of earnings for individuals on Wall Street. Then later in 2008 we again watch as the mortgages bond market opens up, and then once again come crashing down around us. Along the way there were many ethical decisions that were made by numerous individuals, and consequences faced for those decisions that were seen as wrong. These times in our history are moments that Michael Lewis captures in his books The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and Liar’s Poker, and James Stewart captures in his book Den of Thieves. It is almost no coincidence that we have three books, all written at different times in history based on the same type of event. History repeats itself, and if you look at the timeline of when these events occurred, it would not be to far fetch to say that we could see another economic retraction again in our future.
As a young individual on Wall Street, walking into a large company such as Salomon Brothers can be daunting and overwhelming, and you are ready and willing to do whatever is needed to keep your spot. In Lewis’ book Liar’s Poker we read about his personal experience at Salomon Brothers as a new trainee and employee in the 1980’s. As you read you come to understand how Lewis saw the equity department in comparison to their bonds department. At this moment in time bonds were the strong financial instruments due to new legislation. The new legislation stated that the money supply would be fixed and therefore causing interest rates to float, and in turn caused America to borrow money at a rapid pace; 7 trillion dollars in 198...
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...sh each book knowing that wrong was done and that people had to consciously choose to do wrong and make the decisions that then led to economic catastrophes. In James Stewarts book Den of Thieves we are given a further look into the scandals on the 1980s involving Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and others. Stewart focuses on the creed and corruption that was behind all of the events that took place during this time period. In the first part of this book Above the Law takes us through the acts of these criminals, while the second part The Chase discusses the SEC’s mission to bring these criminals justice. Stewart makes us realize certain key points such as the fact that as these individuals committed these crimes that were doing more then just working their way through the system and finding loop holes, they were going against all that American capitalism stands for.
Stewart unleashed a fury of intense and condemning questions upon Cramer. However, unfortunately for Cramer he functioned as a stand-in for the entire CNBC company and our entire corporatized news media. Stewart used multiple video clips of Cramer in 2006 to prove Cramer was well aware of the “shenanigans” that allowed investment returns to roll in at 30 percent per year, and major institutions leveraging at 35-to-1 for most of the 2000s. This leveraging, in effect, is the one thing that caused the fall of Wall Street and the decline of our retirement portfolios' value. Stewart made that point to Cramer and Cramer could not disagree. The crucial question Stewart asks and we will attempt to answer is, do shows like Cramer’s Mad Money and other CNBC reporters have an ethical responsibility to be critical, investigative journalists? We must first understand the actions taken by each party involved in the housing and banking collapse of 2009 in order to fully comprehend the ethical situation that unfolded. One must first understand the actions taken by each party prior to 2009. Bankers backed by investors, started lending mountains of excess cap...
House of Cards describes in particular the complicated series of events that led to the downfall of Bear Sterns in March 2008. Its actual appeal, however, deduces from its complete and careful analysis of the history of the firm since its origination as an upstart brokerage firm in 1923 and a gripping account of the demise of Bear Sterns in 2007. This failure prognosticated a lot of issues that would eventually stultify the firm, and the author puts forward that its deviation from various historical operating practices led to its ultimate sale to JPMorgan Chase at $10 per share, down from over $170 just a year earlier.
The novel Liars Poker by Michael Lewis is a very interesting firsthand account of an inside look into the investment banking world, in particular bond trading at the firm Solomon Brothers in the 1980s. Lewis took an interesting and roundabout way to end up on Wall Street, studying art history at Yale and bombing his interview with Lehman Brothers. But he eventually found himself at Solomon Brothers through a lucky encounter with two managing directors wives. Through his book, Michael Lewis conveys the inner workings of investment banks in the 1980s to the average person using his own experience at Solomon Brothers. The book goes into Lewis’s own rise in the firm, as well as the rise and fall of the entire Solomon Brothers Mortgage department.
The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis of 2008 has been the largest financial crisis to take place since the end of the Great Depression. It was the actions of individuals and companies that caused this crisis. For although it could have been adverted, too much money was being made by too many people in place of authority to think deeply on the situation. As such, by the time actions were taken to attempt to rectify the situation, it was already too late. Trillions of dollar of tax payers’ money was spent trying to repair the situation that was caused by the breakdown of ethics and accountability in the private sector. And despite the government’s actions to attempt to contain the crisis, hundreds of thousands lives were negatively affected before, during, and after this crisis.
In 2008, the U.S economy went through the “Great Recession,” possibly as a result of inappropriate and ineffective regulation in the banking system, causing Lehman Brothers to file for bankruptcy. There was a large debt and housing bubble which resulted in plummeting real estate prices and financial securities. Peter D. Schiff’s “How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes” uses comic illustrations and a simple storyline to teach readers about how the 2008 recession came about and how the U.S tried to relieve it using the ideas of credit, savings, and other economic concepts.
In “The Big Short”, this movie about the economic collapse of 2008 in America highlights how Americans of all racial backgrounds were hit hard when the housing market collapsed. The film provides a very compelling argument and describes how the market crashed because banks began to give out more unstable loans out to people in order to sell more properties, which eventually led to the housing market to be built upon millions of risky loans. This practice grew until the housing market became too unstable because of all the risky loans and resulted in an economic crash. The housing market collapse led to millions of Americans to lose their homes because of foreclosures and led to massive amount of homelessness and unemployment since the Great
In the 1920s the USA had become a mixture of dramatic, social and political change. At this time the cities become larger and there were more people in the cities than in the rural areas. The US economy had more than doubled in strength between 1920 and 1929, this growth in wealth pushed America into the unfamiliar territory of the consumer society. Since Americans had extra money, they spent a lot of it on consumer goods like ready-to-wear cloths, home appliances and cars. However this wealth was only experienced by 40% of the whole population of America. It’s estimated that 60% of all American families lived below the bread-line. Despite this many Americans started to gamble their money in the American stock market. They saw the buying and selling of stocks would be an easy way to make money and because of this, many people bought stocks on the margin’. Buying stock ‘on the margin’ meant that the person couldn’t afford the stocks at full price, the broker could sell the stock to the person at a fraction of the price and the person could pay the broker back with interest at a later stage. The problem with this is that if the selling of the stocks didn’t make a profit, then the person would be in a lot of debt and this happened to many people that where living under the bread-line. Unfortunately despite this many Americans saw the stock mar...
Mackay, Tim. "The Ethics Of The Wolf Of Wall Street." Charter 85.2 (2014): 67.Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
During the prologue, it is described that a financial analyst, Meredith Whitney, made national headlines for successfully predicting that Citigroup firm needs to “slash its dividend or go bust.” This book makes gives the impression that Whitney started the beginning of the economic collapse. This seems unlikely; Whitney only made the prediction that she made based off of her analysis of the markets. Fortunately, she gained the nation's ear. She called out all Wall Street firms and told them that their investments and mortgages were worthless. She was bold and truthful when the everyone else doubted her.
Michael Lewis’s The Big Short tells the tale of the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of a few idiosyncratic characters that saw it coming. Unlike big financial institutions that underestimated the risk of increasingly extending subprime mortgage loans to uncreditworthy customers, Lewis’ characters gauged such risk accurately and anticipated the eventual burst of the housing bubble. Not only did they foresee the inevitable, but they also made a fortune by betting on its happening. Had they conformed to the public sentiment of extreme optimism and confidence in the stability of the real estate market, they would not have reaped immense monetary rewards. Between the lines of The Big Short, there lurks, albeit not too covertly, a message about the benefits of nonconformity. While conformity is often times socially encouraged and applauded, it is important to wonder at times whether going against the flow would be of greater benefit to us or our community. In Michael Lewis’s narrative, defiance of the status quo as a result of skepticism toward financial markets has yielded big payoff, whereas conformity to the widespread denial of the housing market’s unpredictability has incurred massive losses.
Mortgage loans are a substantial form of revenue for the financial industry. Mortgage loans generate billions of dollars in the financial industry. It is no secret that companies have the ability to make a lot of money by offering a variety of mortgage loan products. The problem was not mortgage loans but that mortgage companies were using unethical behavior to get consumer mortgage loans approved. Unfortunately, the Countrywide Financial case was not an isolated case. Many top name mortgage companies have been guilty of unethical behavior. Just as the American housing market was starting to recover from its worst battering since the Great Depression, a new scandal, an epidemic of flawed or fraudulent mortgage documents, threatens to send not just the housing market but the entire economy back into a tailspin (Nation, 2010).
During the 1920s, approximately 20 million Americans took advantage of post-war prosperity by purchasing shares of stock in various securities exchanges. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the fortunes of many investors were lost. In addition, banks lost great sums of money in the Crash because they had invested heavily in the markets. When people feared their banks might not be able to pay back the money that depositors had in their accounts, a “run” on the banking system caused many bank failures. After the crash, public confidence in the market and the economy fell sharply. In response, Congress held hearings to identify the problems and look for solutions; the answer was found in the new SEC. The Commission was established in 1934 to enforce new securities laws that were passed with the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The two new laws stated that “Companies publicly offering securities must tell the public the truth about their businesses, the securities they are selling and the risks involved in the investing.” Secondly, “People who sell and trade securities must treat investors fairly and honestly, putting investors’ interests first.”2
The Wolf of Wall Street produced and directed by Martin Scorsese tells a story of Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker living a luxurious life on Wall Street. Due to greed and corruption, Jordan falls into a life of crime and abusive activities. Belfort made millions of dollars by selling customers “penny stocks” and manipulating the market through his company, Stratton Oakmont, before being convicted of any criminal activity (Solomon, 2013). Jordan reveals behaviours and impulses all humans have, however, on an extreme level. This movie illustrates “why ethics is another tool whose importance cannot be overstated” (Delaney, 2014). Without ethics and morality, individuals can never truly live an honest and happy life.
Eight years ago, the world economy crashed. Jobs were lost, families misplaced, hundreds of thousands of people left shocked and confused as they watched the security of their world fall to pieces around them. In, “The Big Short,” a film directed by Adam McKay and based on the book written by Michael Lewis, viewers get an inside perspective on how the financial crisis of 2008 really happened. Viewers learn the truth about the unethical actions and irrational justifications made by those who unwittingly set the world up for failure. Two main ethically tied decisions are brought into question when watching the film: how could anyone conscionably make the decision to mislead investors by misrepresenting mortgage backed securities (MBS), and why
Jonathan Franzen’s Novel, The Corrections, is a satiric tale of American culture, the lack of values, and the absolute obsession with consumer goods and consumption. It is told through the lives of the Lambert family, and their constant needs to “correct” various mistakes in their lives and behavior. The novel, published in 2001, comments on the social ills of American society; the dependence on world financial markets, new technologies, entitlement programs, big business, and of course, consumerism. While the novel is extreme in its commentary, and sweeping in its size, it is through the recent life of Chip Lambert that we can see parallels to the current U.S. economic situation, and the potential for further disasters.