Essay on Morals and Ethics in the Movie Wall Street

This movie explores issues of greed, human relationships, betrayal and redemption, personal innocence and responsibility as well as the effects on the human mind

Ethics, ethical values, and social responsibility should all work in unison in a corporate business structure. These key traits are better defined as maintaining overall good business morals, obtaining employees who possess personal ethical values, and finally to behave ethically and with sensitivity toward social, cultural, economic and environmental issues. For a business to better ensure these quality business traits a code of ethics should be adopted by the business. In the cases of Bernie Madoff and Enron, the most well-known financial scandals in history, I feel, gave a major hand in pushing business all across America to have and enforce the code of ethics.

The movie takes place in the early 1990’s, when Jordan Belfort partners with Donny Azoff to start his brokerage firm, Stratford-Oakmont. After the introduction given by Jordan, we follow his life from the time that he is 22 years old when he had just started on wall street, all the way to the time of his arrest. Throughout the movie, you can see Jordan’s narcissistic personality aid him in his rise to the top and eventually lead to his fall.

When the names Carnagie, Rockefeller, and Pullman come to mind, most of us automatically think of what we saw or read in our history books: "These men were kind and generous and through hard work and perseverance, any one of you could become a success story like them," right? Wrong. I am sick of these people being remembered for the two or three "good deeds" they have done. Publicity and media have exaggerated the generosity of these men, the government has spoiled these names with false lies, and people have been blind to see that these men were ruthless, sly businessmen who were motivated by your money and their struggle for power.

In Spike Lee 's Do the Right Thing, the story takes places in 1989, another year in the long struggle for equality for African-Americans. The film portrays the racial tensions between locals of the neighborhood and an Italian-American family in the majority Black and Hispanic neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy) in Brooklyn, New York. Spike Lee shows us what a day in the life of the Brooklyn neighborhood consists of and throughout the movie he portrays several different aspects of a modern urban neighborhood, using the many unique personalities of the characters in the movie.

Even though Skilling was committing crimes, such as fraud, he was being recognized for his accomplishments. Mr. Skilling was training Andy Fastow to become an accomplished individual not only criminally, but financially as well. Through all that Andy Fastow absorbed from Skilling, he started his criminal behavior. Andy Fastow created bogus companies to keep the companies debt a secret from others. With this entire event going on Fastow took money and implemented it into his personal accounts. When criminals steal money they tend to do it in small amounts, so others do not discover it, but eventually it gets to a point that it gets so out of control that the person committing the crime cannot stop because the rush is high. He felt as if what he was doing was perfectly acceptable because it should have been part of his daily routines. Since criminality is beyond social control, he had no issues committing them. He continued his behavior and Mr. Fastow only developed his ideas for the better. All of the top executives created an environment of intimate business interactions. They believed that deception was justified and “fraud is the reality” (Magnolia Home Entertainment).

Along with George Jung, Frank Abagnale Jr is a great example of a person wanting more than they can handle. Abagnale begins to devote his life to becoming rich. His reason for working so hard is because his father had problems with the IRS, and he vowed never to

On September 8 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) announced that it was taking an enforcement action against Wells Fargo Bank . Wells Fargo is a Fortune 100 company and one of the "Big Four Banks" of the United States. Investigations conducted by the Bureau revealed that employees of the bank created unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts across the country to meet sales goals. Over the years, the bank’s employees opened over 1.5 million fraudulent bank accounts and 0.5 million fake credit card accounts for customers, to meet sales targets and obtain bonuses. The affected consumers, were being harmed by the associated charges and fees for these accounts. The fees include insufficient funds or overdraft fees for the deposit accounts and annual fees for credit card accounts.

Jordan Belfort, a multi-million dollar scam artist who travelled the road to riches. While travelling this journey, he established many relationships that helped him reach such destination. The memoir The Wolf of Wall Street portrays the relationships and influences people had on Jordan and vice versa. The three biggest influences that Jordan encountered were Mark Hanna, Danny Porush and Nadine Belfort.

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 beginning of the movie opens with Bud Fox trying to convince potential clients to invest in a multitude of companies that he feels are money makers. Most of the people on the other end of the phone do not want to listen to his sales pitch so he must try to use to use the good cop bad cop hardball tactic in order to complete the transaction. Bud Fox starts with the quote “This is the biggest bull market of the generation” in order to try to get the potential client to go along with the deal. He ends the conversation with the quote “Howard I thought you were a gentleman” in order to try to make the client feel guilty. Bud Fox wanted to make a commission on the transaction but he ultimately could not close the deal.

Bernard Madoff had full control of the organizational leadership of Bernard Madoff Investments Securities LLC. Madoff used charisma to convince his friends, members of elite groups, and his employees to believe in him. He tricked his clients into believing that they were investing in something special. He would often turn potential investors down, which helped Bernard in targeting the investors with more money to invest. Bernard Madoff created a system which promised high returns in the short term and was nothing but the Ponzi scheme. The system’s idea relied on funds from the new investors to pay misrepresented and extremely high returns to existing investors. He was doing this for years; convincing wealthy individuals and charities to

1. The Enron debacle created what one public official reported was a “crisis of confidence” on the part of the public in the accounting profession. List the parties who you believe are most responsible for that crisis. Briefly justify each of your choices.

International business ethics challenges the corporate world to deal with questions of what to do in situations where ethical standards come into conflict as a result of the different cultural practices in the nation. Since, there is this dilemma that has progressively troubled the large multinational corporations, international business ethics has arisen to help address these adhesive subject matters. There are several international business ethics discussions on the question of how to act in the home country as opposed to the host country is at the central point of most international corporations. The argument in question is how companies should practice their business according

There was a vast number of ethical issues raised in the movie “Enron-the Smartest Guys in the Room” but the four I am going to focus on are listed below. Art Anderson, Ken Lay and all of the other executives did a number of unethical things which ultimately brought down Enron and affected thousands of employees and their futures. The bottom line was that each and every one of them acted out of greed for the almighty dollar.