How greedy can you be?

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, definitely a fictional movie that is worth your time to watch.  As a person who hasn’t watched any finance-related fictional movie, this interests me as a finance student.  After watching this movie, it made me think if greed is really good? What kind of person are you displaying if you were to be seen as a greed? Honestly, greed is no crime but it does hurt people as well as the economy if your greed has overpowered you.  Not only that, greed may cause you what money cannot buy.

At the beginning of the movie, it was seen that Keller Zabel (KZI)’s share price had dropped due to rumors that was being spread by James Bretton.  Due to rumors which caused the public to sell their shares, KZI’s shares price dropped from $79 to $2 in just a month’s time. If Louis Zabel does not sell the company, it is only going to lead to bankruptcy.  And obviously, Louis doesn’t want that to happen.  In such condition, to save his company, Louis went to the US treasury at the Federal Reserve and asked for a bailout.  Because Bretton had been eyeing on Keller Zabel, Bretton had block Louis’ bailout and offered to buy Keller Zabel at $3 per share which humiliated Louis very badly.  Due to such circumstances, Louis committed suicide because he couldn’t handle such failure. Bretton’s greed had hurt so many people along the way. 

Jacob Moore, who was an apprentice of Keller Zabel, was more than upset to hear the news of the death of his mentor.  Jacob worked in Keller Zabel and tried to raise funds for a fusion research project but was rejected by many.  He attended Gordon Gekko’s lecture where Gekko was selling his book “Greed is Good”, was also talking about the next financial crisis which was going to happen.  As the movie goes on, Gekko told Jacob a private offshore hedge fund, Lotus Fund that was betting against Keller Zabel at the time of the crash of Keller Zabel.  Jacob obviously did some research about it and found out that James was the one behind it all.  As an apprentice of Louis, Jacob wanted to avenge his death.

Then James offered a job placement to Jacob.  As Jacob’s goal was to raise funds for the fusion research project, he took the job.  At some point, James told Jacob that the Chinese was going to throw the funds into fossil fuels and not the fusion research project, Jacob called it quit. 

As for Gekko, he manipulated Jacob to persuade Winnie Gekko who is Gordon’s daughter, to take out the money as for the research.  But what Jacob didn’t know was, Gekko took the money to run a new company with the $100million from Winnie’s bank account.  At this point, Gekko had lost Jacob and Winnie’s trusts and Winnie lost trust in Jacob.

However, Jacob tried to make it up to Winnie by putting every single piece of information that he had of Bretton James that led him to find his private offshore hedge fund and asked her to publicize it and the result caused Bretton’s company.  Because of his greed, Bretton was sent to jail and had to testify for his crime.

As a conclusion, is greed good? In my honest opinion, I think that greed is good, everyone loves money.  But if you were to destroy your virtues and values because you want to be more than greedy, then you have to be prepared to lose things and people that you care about along the way. Greed drives people to become irrational.  You may be good in investing in any stocks, but you may have just lost what is really important to you and concerns you most.