Wall Street: on capitalism and the predatory instinct

ABSTRACT

Financial markets have a social history. In the 19th century, birth of capital markets led to the birth of the stock exchange novel, which inspired H de Balzac, E Zola, etc. During the 1980s, the financialization of the economy saw the cinema captured this change through the financial thriller. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) inaugurates a list of recent movies that deals with the stock exchange. The film Wall Street shows us that financial activity allows rapid social ascension. The stock market activity is presented as a zero-sum game. Money simply passes from one pocket to another by the virtue of magic. The dynamic of capitalism thus finds part of their source in the greed of the individuals that it exploits. The market is the place where another form of economic rationality unfolds in the form of an instinct for predation which is not burdened by morality.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic fiction
• stock markets
• gambling
• predatory instinct

JEL:

• A12
• A13
• A14
• B5
• G

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Filmography

The Big Short, 2015, Film. Directed by Adam McKay, USA, Paramount Pictures.

Boiler Room, 2000, Film. Directed by Ben Younger, USA, Metropolitan Film Export.

Margin Call, 2011. Film. Directed by JC Chandor, USA, Washington Square Films.

Wall Street, 1987. Film. Directed by Oliver Stone, USA, Twentieth Century Fox.

Notes

1. (i) Cassidy (2009). «Casino Capitalism and the Financial Crisis », Anthropology today, 25, n°4, p. 10–13; (ii) Keynes (1936), « The state of long-term expectations » in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; (iii) Strange (1986). Casino Capitalism, Oxford, Blackwell.

2. cf. (i) Berles A., and Means G., 1932 T(ii) Burnham J., 1941; (iii) Galbraith, J. K1966; (iv) Schumpeter, J. A.1942.

3. The writings of John Maynard Keynes to which we refer are ‘Social Consequences of Changes in the Value of Money’ (1923), ‘National Self-Sufficiency’ (1932) and Chapter 12 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).4.

4. Similar considerations can be found in J.C. Chandor’s film Margin Call (2011). In bankruptcy, the bank has to part with some of its employees. Employees look back on their professional past. They question their legitimacy. For trading operations, the bank employs mathematicians. One of the characters studied at MIT. He was a specialist of rocket propulsion. Finance is based on the same type of calculation. Working for a bank pays infinitely better. In another sequence, two traders relax with a drink. They wonder about the stripper remuneration. This reflects something of the order of repressed bad conscience. Working in finance means loving money. The goal is to earn as much money as possible for your employer without forgetting to take it for yourself. In a final sequence, a trader explains that he was previously working on building bridges and therefore doing something deemed useful. ‘That one little bridge has saved the inhabitants of these two communities a total of 1,531 years of their lives not wasted in a fucking car … 1,531 more years of life’ (Chandor, 2011: 1 h 8mn).

5. Gordon Gekko’s remarks are taken from a speech by financier Ivan Boesky to students at Beckley University in 1986. ‘I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself’. Working for the investment bank Drexel Burham (specialised in the issuance of junk bonds), Ivan Boesky was prosecuted for insider trading and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and $100 million in fines.

6. In the 18th century, the term ‘captain or knight of industry’ was often used. It designates a professional gambler who earns his living by cheating at gambling. The reader is advised to see again and again Stanley Kubrick’s magnificent film Barry Lyndon [1975] in which we have a perfect illustration of the illegitimate ways of social ascension: gambling, marriage of interest … The term captain of industry has remained in the everyday vocabulary but it has taken on another meaning. It designates the leader of a large company. The captain of industry defines the strategy and gives the direction to his subordinates as the captain on his ship.

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Notes on contributors

Thierry Suchère

Thierry Suchère is an associate professor in economics at the University of Le Havre. His publications have focused on Marx (the commodity relation, the wage relation...); the place of work in our societies (a book that retraces the genesis of, and analyses, Paul Lafargue's book The Right to be Lazy), on the representations of the world of finance in 19th century novels and 20th century films. Since the health crisis, he reflects on what the war economy teaches us about the place of the state, the market and the laws of economics.