MAnagement 13

Section Two: 1. The documentary, “Inside Job” provides an interpretation of the causes and consequences of the 2008 global financial crisis. Is this interpretation compelling? Be sure to include institutional, ideological and interest factors in your analysis. The movie, the

In the introduction of the book, Ho explicitly states all of her credibility through the positions she held and the connections she made throughout her fieldwork at Wall Street. In addition, Ho is clear in her collection of data through multiple different mediums and different audiences. However, Ho does discuss her racial background and the diversity of those who she was interviewing, yet she does not continue this discussion throughout the book. Additionally, the language and vocabulary used throughout the book are highly specified for a specific scholarly and informed audience. Therefore, while this may not be the best recommendation to those who are not knowledgeable about financial terminology, there is still a substantial amount of research and data about the culture of Wall Street. Overall, this book makes a contribution to the literature on work because of its unique and detailed perspective about a small pocket of industry that ultimately, becomes a model of how work should be conducted. Wall Street shapes not just the stock market but also the nature of employment and what kind of workers are valued. Investment firms are the nucleus of the work market and influence corporate America in the way things should be constantly moving and changing in the market to remain efficient. It is then evident how this ethnography is a key addition to the studies of

Based on the information presented in the PBS documentary and the TIME article, describe how the behaviors of corporations, such as Ford, Firestone, and the financial institutions on Wall Street, could or should be understood as crime whether or not they have been prosecuted? How do these activities differ from those involved in “typical” street crimes?

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was one of many books to be published in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2007. After seeing the global economy stall in the face of massive losses in word financial markets, many Americans sought to better understand the crisis and its causes. This book, written from the perspective of a financial market insider, provides a glimpse into the world of global finance and also seeks to explain how the players in this world were involved in the crisis. In the words of the author Lawrence McDonald, “My objective in writing A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was twofold. First, to provide … a close-up, inside view of how markets really work…..And, second, to give… as crystal clear an explanation as possible about the real reasons why the legendary Lehman Brothers met with such a swift end”1. By writing about his personal experience at Lehman Brothers and recounting stories from within the famous investment banking firm, Mr. McDonald largely succeeds at his first goal. However, the elements of personal biography and the chronological order of the book make it difficult for the reader to fully appreciate all of the varied causes of the financial crash. I believe that the main value of reading this book is in understanding these causes, with Lehman Brothers acting as a microcosm of the greater financial universe. As such, in this review I have isolated elements from Mr. McDonald’s book which highlight how the crisis

“It ain 't what you don 't know that gets you into trouble. It 's what you know for sure that just ain 't so” – Mark Twain [1]. As children we are taught to look both ways before crossing the street because something can be approaching at either side, as adults we have yet to learn to look to the past and then back to the present to prevent ourselves from causing the same economic mistakes. It is no secret of mine, that I have the strong notion that majority of our American society is lazy when it concerns self-educating, but also blind to the destruction we may cause due to greed. I have decided after our in-session viewing of the film “The Big Short” to write my final paper on the information and effects that were portrayed by the film which was based upon the novel, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” by Michael Lewis. This film for many Americans was a necessary wake up call to educate themselves about the causes behind the Financial Crisis that struck our economy in 2007, and what better way to educate an over indulged lazy society than to put it in a movie with attractive actors breaking down basic financial terms into layman’s terms.

Another ethnography of Wall Street was carried out by the anthropologist Karen Ho, who, like Gillian Tett, gives us a true perspective about the nature of the financial industry and helps suggest important factors about a liberal democracy in contemporary times. In her book, Ho raises certain issues with regards to the culture of finance. The banks high employee liquidity created a culture of job insecurity, often using practices and assumptions in effort to create and increase shareholder value. However, the attempt to appreciate the value was through the means of the derivative market, which became an obvious indicator that their assumptions would lead to an economic crisis. Capitalism is run by Wall Street personalities who have strong,

From the CEOs, the Government, prostitutes, and even Ivy League professors, the movie blamed anyone who had even the slightest role in the financial meltdown. In a more non-fiction type setting, the documentary aimed to exposed the corruption on Wall Street and how the government got involved. The documentary seemed to put blame on the greedy 1% of America. According to the film, people in power stay in power and simply rotate their position in power to other like individuals. So top Wall Street executives rotate to leading government positions and thus continue the cycle of greed and destruction. They generalized everyone on Wall Street to be greedy crooks who use drugs and spend corporate

The documentary “Inside Job” offers its viewers with a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, which eventually led to the Great Recession that later cost the world ten trillion dollars and thirty million jobs. Almost all major economist as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agree that the recession is the worst global recession that has ever happened since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The documentary “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, was a story that followed the company ERON and how they went from having major success to filing for bankruptcy. The film followed Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Lou Pai, and Andy Fastow who all worked for ERON and all had “big ideas” for the company. These all had everyone thinking they were all “the smartest guys in the room”, and really cared about the company but in reality they were all stealing money from ERON. They were all stealing money while Andy Fastow job was to cover up the fact that the company was 30 billion dollars in debt and to make it look like it was money actually coming in instead of out. Soon it all caught up to them, an account soon realized that ERON numbers did not add up and

Anger and helplessness were the first emotions that I felt while watching the movie, “The Inside Job.” I was reminded of another movie portraying greed and ruthlessness, Oliver Stone’s 1987, “Wall Street,” which introduced “Greed is good” into the American vernacular (Gordon Gekko). Obviously, the instigators of the 2008 financial crisis embraced the “Greed is good” adage.

The Movie "Inside Job" happens in Fall 2008 amid a worldwide retreat bringing on a whole country of individuals to misfortune their reserve funds, homes, and occupations. The storyteller, Matt Damon paints a reasonable delineation of the occasions, for example, deregulation, theft and IRS evasion in which hinted at the economy ruin.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)

In the movie, the Wall Street collapses in which the 2008 financial crisis left millions of people in the United States unemployed and without homes or money of course, leading to the worst recession since the notorious Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Based on book by Michael Lewis; The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, mentions the financial disaster of 2008, in which like the film adaptation, leads the years leading up to the 2008 disaster. The movie emphasizes not only on the financial establishment, but on the few investors who saw in advance that the mortgage securities market with unoriginal financial products bring unmanageable–those who knew that the system would crash. The main characters are money managers Michael Burry (Christian Bale) and Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) who predicted the crisis and found ways to make over a billion dollars profit from it. Both expected that the housing market and the supporting subprime mortgages were going to crash, finding a way by using

Anyone who desires to make a change in their life can do so, provided that they are willing to risk it all. The film The Wolf of Wall Street is centered on the life of stockbroker and founder of the firm Statton Oakmont, Jordan Belfort. Belfort is the son of two hardworking accountants and at a young age, lands an entry-level job at a top firm on Wall Street. When the firm is forced to close, Belfort settles for a new, lesser job at an investment firm in Long Island and very easily utilizes his sales skills to sell the worst stocks, penny stocks, to the perceived worst clientele, middle class Americans. Belfort soon moves on from this firm and founds Statton Oakmont, which explodes into a prominent firm that makes a huge fortune by defrauding

This movie explains how crisis in 2008 happened in a financial institution in New York. The company exists since 137 years with John Tuld as the Chief Executive Officer. The leader of trading operation is Sam Rogers. He is in the company since 34 years.