For forty years, America built a safety net for retirement, healthcare, clean water and air, automotive safety, and more. In the late 1970s, we began to unravel it. Nothing captured the spirit of the day better than the movie Wall Street (1987), which originated the saying, “Greed is good” and depicted the other axiom of the 1980s, “The market is always right.” Hollywood has been getting it right ever since, especially with the financial/housing meltdown of 2008/2009. We’ll watch two movies that set the stage. After that, in five others we’ll see how deregulation and poor oversight led to the meltdown. Finally, we’ll consider ways in which today’s investment bankers and other money managers are still exploiting weaknesses in our financial system, to their benefit and our detriment.
((Cherry - Tuesday - Online)) |
