Oliver Stone’s film, Wall
Street (1987) was filmed in the midst of U.S. President Reagan’s push for
financial deregulation. As a MBA student at the time, I volunteered to help a
professor with his paper on financial deregulation. The theory behind why the
NASD (the National Association of Securities Dealers) could self-regulate its
members seemed solid enough to this idealistic youngster (i.e., me); I had yet
to witness human nature in the field, and over decades. Similar to Marx
overlooking the human need for economic compensation as an incentive to work on
a daily basis (though I overlook it too in posting free essays online), I was
blind to human nature in that I did not see that the NASD itself would protect
even its most sordid members so to safeguard the reputation of the profession
and, even more realistically, stick up for other “members” of the “club.” The Newtonian-like
automatic mechanism whereby industry self-regulation would work was too
beautiful to let human nature interfere. Similarly, when I worked in public
accounting, I saw the “check mark” indicating that, “as per comptroller,
discrepancy resolved,” was just one of several technical points in conducting
an audit. The illusion of technique as somehow objective in the business world
can shield practitioners from the ethical content. In case you’re wondering how
this relates to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the antagonist Gordon Gekko is
the poster child for greed, and thus the reason why the public should not rely
on industry self-regulation to police Wall Street. Bud Fox goes headlong into
being Gekko’s insider-trading protégé, easily ignoring conscience personified
by Lou Mannheim even though he and Bud work in the same brokerage office. In Freudian
terms, the id easily defeats the superego. It’s not even a close fight.
The full essay is at "Wall Street."
