#11 Wall Street

In the 1980’s the US economy was very prosperous for the wealthy, but the poverty level rose greatly, particularly for Hispanics and Blacks in the country. “The Reagan boom was an uneven one, despite continued economic expansion [1].” During this time, over 14.5 million jobs were created, but over 70 percent went to white males, and many were in middle to upper-class professions. In the movie Wall Street, this “rich get richer” philosophy runs rampant. In the movie Wall Street, character Gordon Gekko does well to explain the ideology behind the 1980’s economy with three simple words: “Greed is good.”

Wall Street depicts the “hustler’s ambition” showed by 1980’s stock brokers and investment bankers: lie and cheat your way into money, by any means possible. The main character Bud Fox began as a seemingly innocent man with a will for success. He is basically corrupted by Gekko and becomes the prank-monkey and eventually the miniature version of his mentor. Fox begins trading illegal inside information about stock companies with his greedy clients so they can make more money, and so begins to prosper himself. The ruthless Gekko buys the majority of the stock in a company called Teldar Paper and manipulates the stockholders into giving him a great deal of power over the company’s future.

At one point in the movie Gekko states to Fox, “It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.” This statement perfectly describes the mentality of the economy during the 1980’s. The effect of “Reaganomics” on the country seems very bittersweet; it helped many middle and upper class families gain wealth, as well as brought in a huge amount of tax revenue, but many of the poor and impoverished lost their jobs and were forced to work for minimum wage as blue collar jobs disappeared. In just two years from 1980 to 1982, “the percentage of Americans below the poverty level rose from 11.7 percent to 15 percent [2].” The movie Wall Street was made during the 1980’s to show the United States exactly what it was evolving into: a country where greed and lust for money reign over all other things.

[1] Nation of Nations pg. 950
[2] Nation of Nations pg. 951