Gordon Gekko

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Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

He said that any time an industry fails in protecting its customers it injures trust in the whole industry—a negative outcome for everyone involved. This snapshot of Francois Michelin does not, of course, disprove the existence of unprincipled Gordon Gekkos in the world of high finance and enterprise. But there is nothing in business or the market economy that mandates a selfish dog-eat-dog ethic. The Apostle of Selfishness We began this chapter with Gordon Gekko announcing that greed is good. As he goes on to say to the shareholders of the fictional Teldar Paper Corporation, “Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

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Start a Business Jobs: The Best Anti-Poverty Program The Fallacy of the Fixed Pie Foreign Aid That Doesn’t The Moral Appeal of Good Work A Theology of Enterprise Suggestions for Further Reading CHAPTER 4 - Why the “Creative Destruction” of Capitalism Is More Creative than Destructive Creative Destruction, Creative Flourishing Globalization, Christianity, and Culture Globalization and Coercive Destruction Globalization and Culture Suggestions for Further Reading CHAPTER 5 - Why Greed Is Not Good–and Why You Can Get More of It with Socialism ... What Is Greed? The Role of Profits Excess Profits? Moral Profits Beyond Gordon Gekko The Apostle of Selfishness The Socialist Mirage The Personable Person and the Market Suggestions for Further Reading CHAPTER 6 - The Idol of Equality The Value of the 1 Percent Mind the Floor, Not the Ceiling Do We Know Who We Are? Equal Respect, Not Equal Conditions Social Justice and the Common Good Suggestions for Further Reading CHAPTER 7 - Why Smart Charity Works–and Welfare Doesn’t Desiccated Compassion Government Isn’t the Only Institution Desiccated Christianity The Mayor of My Neighborhood The Fatal Welfare Conceit The Samaritan Suggestions for Further Reading CHAPTER 8 - The Health of Nations: Why State-Sponsored Health Care Is Not Compassionate Fighting a Fire with Gasoline Price, Profit, and Cost Let Them Compete Big Brother, Big Burden The Secret to Slashing Costs The Right to Health Care Understood Aright The Religious History of Health Care Suggestions for Further Reading CHAPTER 9 - Caring for the Environment Doesn’t Have to Mean Big Government Christianity Caricatured Environmentalism as an Extension of Marxism Humanophobia Beware the Zero-Sum Fallacy and Unintended Consequences Suggestions for Further Reading CHAPTER 10 - A Theology for Economic Man Vocation–Calling The Dead Suggestions for Further Reading Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Index Copyright Page PRAISE FOR DEFENDING THE FREE MARKET “I’ve been eagerly anticipating such a book from Father Sirico for a long time.

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All he can do is become a thief or a cream-skimming government insider. Under capitalism, he has another option: he can excel in a socially useful business. In this way, capitalism provides the greedy person a socially beneficent alternative to exploitation. Remember villainous business executive Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street? “Greed is good,” he claimed. Unfortunately, many real-life defenders of capitalism argue along the same lines. Greed, they claim, is the stimulant that drives the economy. And critics of the free market readily agree—they hate capitalism because they believe it fosters greed.

Python for Algorithmic Trading: From Idea to Cloud Deployment by Yves Hilpisch

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brownian motion, cloud computing, coronavirus, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Guido van Rossum, implied volatility, information retrieval, margin call, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, paper trading, passive investing, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, systematic trading, transaction costs, value at risk

String replacements are often used to parametrize text output: In [25]: repl = 'My name is %s, I am %d years old and %4.2f m tall.' In [26]: print(repl % ('Gordon Gekko', 43, 1.78)) My name is Gordon Gekko, I am 43 years old and 1.78 m tall. In [27]: repl = 'My name is {:s}, I am {:d} years old and {:4.2f} m tall.' In [28]: print(repl.format('Gordon Gekko', 43, 1.78)) My name is Gordon Gekko, I am 43 years old and 1.78 m tall. In [29]: name, age, height = 'Gordon Gekko', 43, 1.78 In [30]: print(f'My name is {name:s}, I am {age:d} years old and \ {height:4.2f}m tall.') My name is Gordon Gekko, I am 43 years old and 1.78m tall. Defines a string template the “old” way. Prints the template with the values replaced the “old” way.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

FINANCE AND THE GORDON GEKKO EFFECT Part of the challenge in thinking about fairness in finance is culture. We don’t usually ask whether a market transaction is fair or not—as long as two mutually consenting adults agree to an exchange, that seems fair enough. But the culture of Homo economicus can sometimes be taken to the extreme, as reflected by one of the most famous lines in movie history: “Greed is good.” In fact, this is a slight adaptation of Michael Douglas’s actual line in the 1987 movie Wall Street, in which Douglas plays the sleazy yet charismatic financier Gordon Gekko. “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

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314 The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis Explains 318 (Ab)Normal Accidents 320 Liquidity Withdrawal Symptoms 324 Chapter 10. Finance Behaving Badly 330 Finance Rules 330 Out-Ponzi-ing Ponzi 332 The Ultimatum Game 335 A Neuroscience of Morality? 338 Is Finance Fair? 340 Finance and the Gordon Gekko Effect 345 Regulatory Culture 349 Environment Strikes Again 352 Moore’s Law versus Murphy’s Law 355 The Tyranny of Complexity 361 Chapter 11. Fixing Finance 365 An Ounce of Prevention 365 Ecosystem Management 366 Adaptive Regulation 368 Law Is Code 371 Mapping Financial Networks 375 The CSI of Crises 378 Privacy with Transparency 384 Anti-Gekko Therapies 387 Chapter 12.

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From the perspective of the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, this means that culture is also subject to evolution, to the same processes of variation, selection, and replication as a biological species or a mental narrative. In fact, we can think of culture as a very large bundle of interrelated narratives, transmitted through the generations, and changing with the human environment. The character of Gordon Gekko, despite being the villain of Oliver Stone’s morality play, possesses traits that our culture perceives as important. Gekko is wealthy, highly skilled, physically attractive, and powerful. Someone who aspires to these traits may try to mimic Gekko’s behaviors, as apparently many did in real life, as the Bud Fox character, the nominal hero of Wall Street, does in the movie.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Scaramucci is a talented schmoozer with a knack for self-promotion, yet his consistent energy makes it all seem authentic. He cleverly product-placed a large SkyBridge banner in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street II, and even landed a cameo. He further enhanced his profile with his well-received book, Goodbye Gordon Gekko, which was a timely self-critical reflection on Wall Street’s culture of greed. His rise has been extraordinary, and Davos has played no small part in it. While many of Scaramucci’s most valuable contacts stem from the WEF, he has since spread his wings far beyond the WEF and built his own wildly successful forum, the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (SALT).

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Milken was in his element, holding court and chatting with the guests. I had a fabulous time and could not help but think that this was exactly how I had imagined this parallel universe to be when reading about it so many years earlier, half the world away. The tale of junk bond king Mike Milken is one of triumph, tragedy, redemption, and comeback. In the Gordon Gekko-ish 1980s, this ingenious financier revolutionized the financial system by opening up capital markets to companies which had previously not been considered creditworthy. He created a market and channeled billions of dollars into companies by issuing high-yield bonds, also dubbed junk bonds. So great was the boom he created that at some point it exceeded the financing of investment-grade companies.

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According to estimates, about 8 percent of global wealth, or $7.5 trillion, is squirreled away in tax havens, $6 trillion of which has not been taxed.16 This hidden wealth distorts the picture of inequality, which if factored in would likely be even greater.17 Approaching the Tipping Point The situation is so egregious that even members of the establishment have begun going rogue. “Class traitors” such as George Soros, Nick Hanauer, and Paul Tudor Jones have warned of the potentially dramatic consequences of inequality and suggested measures to reduce it. Even Asher Edelman, the real-life Gordon Gekko on whom the movie Wall Street’s ruthlessly greedy protagonist was partly modeled, has turned dissident, arguing for the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders as the best option for the U.S. economy.18 The economic discontent has led to unprecedented political polarization, pitting the “have-nots” against the “haves,” the proletariat against the intellectual elite, and the young against the old.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Across the street was an even more personally satisfying view: the building where Adam once begged Stella Templo to help him stay in the country. Adam was also tickled to find out that WeWork’s new space had been used as the set for the movie Wall Street. WeWork put up a poster of Michael Douglas in French cuffs and suspenders to mark the location of Gordon Gekko’s fictional office. The space was a more appropriate setting than WeWork’s previous offices for a visit from Jimmy Lee, a legendary banker at JPMorgan: Gekko’s character was said to have been based partly on Lee, who had worked with companies ranging from General Motors to Facebook. JPMorgan had been keeping its eye on WeWork.

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Adam flew with friends and family to Turks and Caicos for a three-day thirty-fifth birthday party. Miguel had moved into a nice apartment in Manhattan with a great view, fulfilling his childhood dream of being able to see the New York City skyline from his home, but he felt bashful sharing the valuation with his friends and family. At a party in May to celebrate an expansion of WeWork’s Gordon Gekko headquarters, several of New York’s biggest landlords, including Steven Roth, the septuagenarian founder of Vornado, stood under a net of white and black balloons and toasted Neumann, the young man they had once looked at with skepticism. “Adam always says, ‘No schmucks and no assholes,’” Roth said.

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When they reviewed security footage from the night before, preparing to identify and chastise whichever WeWork member had disrespected the community, they were surprised to see that it wasn’t a member at all. Adam and another WeWork executive had spent the night drinking beers and playing on a Time Crisis video game console. Their employees were left to pick up the mess. * * * A FEW WEEKS LATER, WeWork employees arrived at the company’s Gordon Gekko headquarters one morning to find that a large glass wall in Adam’s office was cracked. The night before, an employee had apparently broken it with a bottle of Don Julio 1942, Adam’s favorite tequila. Adam and a group of employees had been celebrating yet another funding round: $355 million, at a valuation of $5 billion.

Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers by Joris Luyendijk

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Emanuel Derman, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flash crash, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, inventory management, job-hopping, Large Hadron Collider, light touch regulation, London Whale, Money creation, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, regulatory arbitrage, Satyajit Das, selection bias, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, too big to fail

The general ignorance about the current threat posed by the financial system came across very clearly every time anyone asked me at parties, over dinner or at the school gates what had surprised me most about ‘those bankers’. The question often came with a cynical laugh as if nothing genuinely serious was at stake; they seemed to anticipate my answer would be ‘greed’, ‘cocaine’ or ‘arrogance’. Many referred to the Gordon Gekko character from the iconic 1987 film Wall Street and his famous quote: ‘Greed, for want of a better word, is good.’ I would resist pointing out that Gordon Gekko was not a banker but a ‘corporate raider’ or ‘activist shareholder’ taking over companies against their will, and instead I’d tell them how some of the things I’d learnt about bankers had ‘lightning-bolted me off my horse’, as the Flemish expression goes.

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Many people in banking try to project an image of perfection, he had found. ‘Banks play to that, trying to make you look perfect and feel invulnerable. It’s very easy to get hooked into that life, to become addicted to work and the money. I am sure it would have happened to me, had I done this for too long.’ When doing research for the Gordon Gekko character in the famous film Wall Street, scriptwriter Stanley Weiser spoke to a great number of top financial workers. In an interview on the DVD Weiser echoes the idea of finance as an existential trap for those with addictive personalities: ‘The Gekkos of the world are people who have a complete inability to process the reality of … of death.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

As Bianco put it, “What sets Salomon apart is the sheer scale on which it oper-ates in the markets, reflecting an appetite for risk unrivaled among financial middlemen.” Four years later, Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s memoir of his years at Salomon, would cement its status as the paradigmatic bank of the 1980s, the same decade that produced the original Oliver Stone Wall Street movie, with Gordon Gekko’s famous “Greed is good” speech. Looking back, however, Salomon seems so … small. When the Business Week story was written, it had $68 billion in assets and $2.8 billion in shareholders’ equity. It expected to earn $1.1 billion in operating profits for all of 1985. The next year, Gutfreund earned $3.2 million.3 At the time, those numbers seemed extravagant.

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In 1987, Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities introduced the term “Master of the Universe” to American culture, in the form of multimillionaire investment banker Sherman McCoy, who lived in “the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world.”72 Although the term was used sarcastically, and McCoy turns out badly in both the human and financial senses, the image of the swashbuckling, super-rich banker engaged in transactions too complex to be understood by ordinary mortals was born. Also in 1987, Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street was released, with its memorable antihero, corporate raider Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas). Although the movie’s story shows the corruption and ultimate downfall of Gekko, it is remembered for his “Greed is good” speech, which justified the pursuit of money above all else. As screenwriter Stanley Weiser wrote recently, many people would later tell him the movie made them want to work on Wall Street: “A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: ‘The movie changed my life.

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As screenwriter Stanley Weiser wrote recently, many people would later tell him the movie made them want to work on Wall Street: “A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: ‘The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko.’ ”73 Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s 1989 memoir, an ironic antibildungsroman in which the hero is fascinated but ultimately repelled by life at Salomon Brothers, popularized life on Wall Street for a generation of college students. As Lewis wrote much later, I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Because it’s a story about how things happen in the real world—and because the real world is messy—the topics are broad in scope. They range from the most insignificant of habits that I’ve developed, like what to read first, to the grandest: whom to choose as heroes and mentors and how their wisdom can change your life. This book traces the arc of a transformation. I started off as a Gordon Gekko wannabe—brash, shortsighted, and entirely out for myself. Then a series of transformations and self-realizations led me on a path from Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor to Ruane Cunniff to Poor Charlie’s Almanack to Robert Cialdini, then to meeting Mohnish Pabrai and lunch with Warren Buffett.

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With Warren’s permission, we had also hired our wedding photographer to memorialize the event. I was so nervous that I was run down and had a cold. I knew that Buffett was a penetrating judge of character, and I was afraid of being exposed. What if he saw through me and detected any lingering remnants of the Gordon Gekko side of my nature? But I was also enormously excited. From my meals with Mohnish, I’d seen what a huge impact it can have simply to hang out with a person you revere. So I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing Warren up close, of observing what made him tick. This would be the ultimate capitalist master class.

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Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.” In some ways, this scheming Machiavellian, approach to life and business is quite seductive. In my youth, there was a part of me that certainly identified with it, fancying myself as a budding Gordon Gekko, with the intelligence and cunning to manipulate my way to the top. And as my experience at D. H. Blair taught me, there is plenty of opportunity on Wall Street for cynical operators to get rich by putting their own interests first. But as I later discovered, there is also a more enlightened path to success, even within the dog-eat-dog financial world—an approach that I have come to think of as “The Buffett-Pabrai Way.”

The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess by Turney Duff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, proprietary trading, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Turney Duff yields to temptation at every turn, and the sheer volume of criminal behavior he saw, and even participated in, is astonishing.… If you want to see Wall Street’s seamy underbelly firsthand, read this book.” —Frank Partnoy, bestselling author of F.I.A.S.C.O. and Infectious Greed “If you took Gordon Gekko, Bud Fox, a copy of Bright Lights, Big City, and threw them in a blender with an ounce of cocaine, a bottle of Patrón Tequila, and your favorite teddy bear, you’d have yourself a Buy Side smoothie. Turney’s my kind of guy; a madman with heart. I couldn’t put the book down.” —Colin Broderick, author of Orangutan Copyright © 2013 by Turney Duff All rights reserved.

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All I know is, he moved to San Francisco with his second wife. He still works in finance. He shaved his mustache and traded in the Corvette for a navy blue Mercedes 560 SL that he calls the Boesky Benz. He named the car after his biggest client, Ivan Boesky, who was at least partly the inspiration for Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko. Because of Uncle Tucker, the Wall Street world has always seemed magical to me. But the idea of working there has never even entered my mind. He must know successful, influential people, even in the world of journalism. I jot down his number and say goodbye. Tucker answers the phone on the first ring.

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I feel like I’m in the movie Pretty Woman, but I’m unsure if I’m Julia Roberts or Richard Gere. I look in the mirror at myself draped in Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, and Prada. With each suit I try on I feel more powerful. “Hi there, buddy,” I say to my reflection clad in the navy blue Prada. Peter is confused by my Gordon Gekko portrayal. “Sandbagged me on Bluestar, huh? I guess you think you taught the teacher a lesson that the tail can wag the dog, huh? Well, let me clue you in, pal. The ice is melting right underneath your feet.” Kevin, who has seen the movie, laughs at my performance. I end up buying five suits, two pairs of shoes, and a bunch of shirts.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

This was the kind of practice Gordon Gekko (you’ve met him in Chapter 3) was attacking in Wall Street, when he pointed out the company that he was trying to take over had no less than thirty-three vice presidents, doing God knows what. Many pro-market economists, especially Michael Jensen and Eugene Fama, the 2013 Nobel Economics Prize winner, have suggested that this principal-agent problem can be reduced, if not eliminated, by aligning the interests of the managers more closely to those of the shareholders. They suggested two main approaches. One is making corporate takeover easier (so more Gordon Gekkos, please), so that managers who do not satisfy the shareholders can be easily replaced.

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The change was particularly pronounced in the US and the UK, in which new finance has advanced the furthest and in which, unlike in Germany or Japan, stakeholders other than shareholders have had little influence on how companies are managed. The first important change has been a further shrinking time horizon in management. With the rise of hostile takeovers in the 1980s (recall Gordon Gekko from Chapter 3), companies had already been put under increasing pressure to deliver short-term profits, if necessary at the cost of long-term competitiveness. But with the proliferation of so many financial instruments that provide quick and high returns, shareholders have become even more impatient in the last couple of decades.

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Their raids proved spectacularly successful, and soon an entire industry of copycats sprang up to mirror their tactics. The age of the corporate raider had begun. I LIKE TO tell my students that private equity is a tale of two Gordons. The first Gordon is Gordon Gekko. In this lens, private equity firms and their managers are real-life versions of Oliver Stone’s immoral banker from the movie Wall Street. They believe that “greed is good,” that all is fair in love and business, and that, in the free market, avarice is a competitive advantage. The Gordon Gekko view of private equity is a morality tale about those who create nothing and yet take everything. The second Gordon is Flash Gordon. Seen in this light, the realm of private equity is not the immoral world of Wall Street.

…

It is populated by all-American polo players who graduated from Yale and then transform into superheroes devoted to saving the world from destruction and waste. Private equity managers, in this tale, are real-life heroes, bringing new energy and vigor to our economies. These two schools of thought tell very different stories about what private equity is and how it works. The Gordon Gekko school understands it as being primarily about wealth extraction—charging high fees to pension funds, driving hard bargains with struggling companies, firing and mistreating workers, exploiting tax loopholes, and then selling companies to the gullible public at inflated prices. This is a bleak vision.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

There you get mental action spurred by desire, ambition, vanity, without any of the moderating influences which we are prone to admire—sympathy, tenderness and fair play.” This characterization sounds very much like the way many view finance today. There is a fairly straight line from Cowperwood to the Gordon Gekko of Wall Street, the Patrick Bateman of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and to the Eric Packer of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Cowperwood is actually a fully rounded character, whom it is easy to sympathize with. Gradually, the finance protagonists have become less sympathetic and realistic, and more ghoulish and robotic.

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Given how pervasive the theme of insatiable desire is in modern-day depictions of finance, it begs the question: Does this theme of insatiable desire reflect an idea grounded in finance? It is tempting to conclude that in fact finance is all about the individual pursuit of more. After all, when Gordon Gekko of Wall Street says “greed is good,” isn’t he actually framing a key insight of economics—that the pursuit of self-interest in some settings can lead to good outcomes? In fact, the most fundamental idea of finance questions the pursuit of more. It is an idea so foundational that it is often not taught and just left unsaid—as I have done so far.

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own by Garett Jones

behavioural economics, centre right, classic study, clean water, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, hive mind, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, meta-analysis, prediction markets, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, social intelligence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

This is one example of the famous “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which individual greed leads to an awful group outcome. Prisoner’s dilemmas are everywhere, and they’re the precise opposite of Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand,” in which individual greed leads to a positive group outcome. Invisible hands and prisoner’s dilemmas are both at work in the world: sometimes, as Gordon Gekko said in the movie Wall Street, “Greed is good,” and sometimes greed creates misery. In this and the next chapter, we’ll see how greed can create misery, and we’ll see how higher-IQ groups are just a bit more likely to find a way to cooperate, a bit more likely to avoid the prisoner’s dilemma. The Real Prisoner’s Dilemma First off, let’s go back to the source—the classic economic example of when greed is bad.

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Taiwan, 60 United States: average cognitive ability score in, 170; average IQ score in, 39, 47, 72, 170; as borrower from China, 82; da Vinci Effect in, 47; Democrats, 124, 126–27; downsizing of military, 69; economic policies, 123–24; education in, 122; GDP per person and cognitive ability in, 9; immigration to, 47–48, 159–60, 174n17; IQ and income in, 31, 32, 44; IQ and probability of voting in, 128; IQ and smoking in, 67–68; IQ scores in military, 29, 50; IQ scores of East Asians in, 45–46; lead exposure in, 63; presidential test scores, 119; Republicans, 124, 126–27; rising IQ scores in, 50; savings rate in, 72; taxation in, 122 Uruguay: average cognitive ability score in, 170; average IQ score in, 170 Vanhanen, Tatu: IQ and the Wealth of Nations, 38, 40–41 Veblen, Thorstein: on conspicuous consumption, 73–74; Veblen Effect, 73–74 verbal similarities tests, 51, 57 vocabulary tests, 20, 23, 33, 58, 125, 167 wages: minimum wage, 108; relationship to immigration, 47–48, 157–60; relationship to IQ scores, 4–5, 6–7, 14, 30–32, 35, 36, 43–44, 47–48, 49, 152, 153–54, 174n12; relationship to productivity, 30–31, 140–41, 144, 156 Wall Street: Gordon Gekko in, 86 Warner, John T., 69 Wechsler IQ test, 15, 20, 37, 39, 51, 125 Weede, Erich, 171n7 Weel, Jaap, 98–100 Wen Jiabao, 82 Wicherts, Jelte: on Lynn, 41–44, 56; on Sub-Saharan IQ score, 41, 42–43, 56 Wicherts, Jelte M., 173n1 Williams, Robert L., 175n18 win-stay/lose-shift strategy, 176n4 win-win outcomes, 2–3, 106–8, 109–10, 113, 151, 166 Wisconsin study of IQ and earnings, 31, 48 Wittman, Donald: on democracy and the Coase Theorem, 108; The Myth of Democratic Failure, 108 Wolfers, Justin, 134 Wolfinger, Raymond E., 128 Wonderlic IQ test, 176n10 Woodley, Michael A., 129 World Bank, 118 Yemen: average cognitive ability score in, 170; average IQ score in, 170 Zitzewitz, Eric, 134

Shipping Greatness by Chris Vander Mey

business logic, corporate raider, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fudge factor, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, performance metric, recommendation engine, Skype, slashdot, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, two-pizza team, web application

Do yourself a favor and avoid warning-level offenses: don’t use these icky aphorisms. If you find someone using them, let such phrases be a reminder to you that he or she is in stage 1. Ask the individual to stop and move on to stage 2. Stage 2: Being Fair and Using Data Now that you’ve put away the “I have to get the lowest possible price because that’s what Gordon Gekko would do” attitude, you can go about negotiating reasonably. The most reasonable way to negotiate a number is by trading data. For example, you volunteer some data: “I can get bandwidth from AT&T for $1/Gb.” Then the other party will volunteer additional data: “Our costs are $0.95 per Gb.” Hopefully things end nicely at this point, settling at $0.98 or $0.97 per gigabit (depending on who’s more of an a-hole), and both parties win.

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If this is you, proceed to stage 6 and light a candle at the chapel on the way home. Also, some money to the Salvation Army Santa might be in order. Most of us are not so lucky because fatigue makes everything worse (or so my new-mother friends tell me). It’s possible that stage 1 (in which you wanted to be Gordon Gekko, master of the universe) may rear its ugly head again. Posturing may ensue: “OK, we’re too far apart; I guess we’ll have to build it ourselves.” Threats may be made: “We’re going to put you out of business anyway…” Phones may be put on mute and warning-offense quality curses uttered. It’s at this point that a necessary cooling-off period is introduced organically.

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

But Wall Street’s newfound fame turned sour for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The huge rewards led to conspicuous consumption, flash spending and growing media interest in life on Wall Street. In the late 1980s Tom Wolfe’s bestseller Bonfire of the Vanities, Michael Douglas’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street and Michael Lewis’s tale of the Salomon Brothers jungle, Liar’s Poker, picked out some not very attractive characteristics of investment banking people.16 A crop of insider trading and market manipulation cases – notably the Boesky and Milken affairs in America and the Guinness scandal in the UK – revived old memories of greed and corruption in financial circles.17 Ivan Boesky was a prominent risk arbitrageur – someone who takes stock market positions in the hope of profiting from takeover bids – who received a prison sentence and a $100 million fine in 1986 after admitting to trading on insiders’ tips.18 Boesky was well known in financial circles but what shocked the public at large was where the trail led.

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Clients pressed the banks to cut prices in some areas but not in others. No one seemed concerned about the high returns being made by the investment banks and their employees. Why? One reason is that the clients were committed to the market economy, trusted it to work and saw no need to intervene. Like Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, they believed that ‘Greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.’1 Another reason is that they were also in the markets for their own greed, and as long as this was fed they would not disturb the system. They were using other people’s money and were not too bothered about, to paraphrase J.

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Gordon Gekko, It's morning again in America, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

Easy in another sense, too, in that it made no moral demands. Americans have always been entrepreneurial and have always believed that to get rich is glorious. But our long-abandoned Calvinism treated wealth as a sign of moral worth, the fruit of discipline and self-denial, not the fruit of looking out for number one. The Horatio Alger stories were not Gordon Gekko stories or Ivan Boesky stories or Bernie Madoff stories. The characters did wear suspenders, but they were not masters of any universe, did not smoke big cigars or drink $1,000 bottles of wine or take clients to strip clubs. For all his social conservatism, Ronald Reagan’s vision of the good life was remarkably amoral.

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

Welcoming contributions from a diverse pool of authors, the series aims to reinstate the concise and incisive booklet as a powerful strand of politico-literary life, amplifying the voices of those who have something urgent to say about a topical theme. Britain in a Perilous World: The Strategic Defence and Security Review We Need JONATHAN SHAW The UK’s In-Out Referendum: EU Foreign and Defence Policy Reform DAVID OWEN Establishment and Meritocracy PETER HENNESSY Greed: From Gordon Gekko to David Hume STEWART SUTHERLAND The Kingdom to Come: Thoughts on the Union Before and After the Scottish Referendum PETER HENNESSY Commons and Lords: A Short Anthropology of Parliament EMMA CREWE The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny STEPHEN GREEN Breaking Point: The UK Referendum on the EU and its Aftermath GARY GIBBON Brexit and the British: Who Are We Now?

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round by Daniel Davies

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, cryptocurrency, fake it until you make it, financial deregulation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, illegal immigration, index arbitrage, junk bonds, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, social web, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, vertical integration, web of trust

The founders of OPM were keen on acronyms – at the height of their success, the other partner tried to bid for the Madison Square Garden entertainment complex seemingly for no other reason than that its initials were the same as his – Myron S. Goodman. Weissman and Goodman were a hell of a team; part Marx Brothers, part Gordon Gekko. They were brothers-in-law, highly regarded in the Orthodox Jewish community as philanthropists and for their devoutly religious and scholarly manner. Goodman would begin meetings by quoting Bible verses, while Weissman took time out from the business in 1973 to fight in the war against Egypt.

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When no fewer than twenty-three consecutive takeovers had significant buying from a single stockbroker’s office in Bowling Green, Kentucky, it raised some red flags. It turned out that one of the chatroom crowd had started passing on tips to friends and relatives in his home town. It didn’t help matters that some of Freeman’s syndicate had decided to name their trading account ‘Blue Horseshoe Investments’, after the code name used by Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street. By 2000, the whole network had been rolled up. The interesting thing here is that this sort of insider dealing is a relatively modern crime. In the USA, it was banned in 1934, but it remained legal in the UK until 1980 and was only banned in New Zealand in 1998 (and even then, the Kiwis only got round to making it a criminal, rather than civil, offence in 2008).

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Start-ups seem to believe it is okay for them to bend rules. Some, like Uber and Airbnb, have built their businesses by defying regulations. Then again, if laws are stupid, why follow them? In the World According to Start-ups, when tech companies cut corners it is for the greater good. These start-up founders are not like Gordon Gekko or Bernie Madoff, driven by greed and avarice; they are Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., engaging in civil disobedience. There’s also a sense among start-ups that it’s okay for them to break the rules because they’re underdogs competing against huge opponents; they’re David, firing his slingshot at Goliath.

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As with my first score, I don’t argue with Trotsky or try to haggle or negotiate. I just listen. The third category is VORP, the scoring system that Halligan borrowed from Major League Baseball. VORP stands for value over replacement player. VORP is a cruel, heartless metric, and it’s weird to set it right alongside HEART. It’s like putting a photo of Gordon Gekko next to a photo of the Dalai Lama. VORP is the opposite of HEART. It’s the anti-HEART. It’s HEART-less. In this category I figure I will get a one, or a zero, or even a negative number, if that’s possible. I’m being paid a lot of money to do a job that a summer intern could do, a job that originally was created as a part-time assignment for Cranium’s administrative assistant.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The bull had come roaring back in the financial capital of the world after the punishing doldrums of the 1970s. Peter Lynch was in the midst of his historic run at the helm of Fidelity Investments’ Magellan Fund. Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, was becoming a household name. It was the Wall Street of Michael Lewis and Gordon Gekko, of hostile takeovers and the Reagan Revolution. Times were good and getting better. Denizens of the Street were more than ready to celebrate. Levine couldn’t have cared less about the bull market. The programmer had little interest in trading or making money. His mind was focused on a single subject: changing the world through computers.

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Sans electricity, Levine sat in shadows—surrounded by brightly lit booths with flashy displays from deep-pocketed competitors like Instinet. Levine tried to hand out dollar bills or Susan B. Anthony coins impressed with an Island stamp, since it cost just a buck to execute a trade on Island. Most attendees—think Armani-clad traders with Rolex watches and greasy Gordon Gekko hairdos—didn’t want the free dollar. Levine decided to stick to programming. He’d find others to pitch Island. Better yet, Island would sell itself. FROM the beginning, Levine’s trading pool was humming like a Formula One race car. Using Island, Watcher users could blast trades into the market at speeds never before seen.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

These critics argued that government had kept a lid on business for too long: managers of big businesses had grown complacent and had stopped driving profits, and the whole economy was stagnating as a result. If companies were turbocharged to maximize profits, it would jolt the whole country and the whole world into growth. To get there, all you had to do was prioritize profit. A pithier version of Friedman’s big idea soon swept through the culture, expressed by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: “Greed is good.” The effect of shareholder primacy was to drive a stark line between a company’s shareholders and its stakeholders, defined as every other party affected by its business and including its employees, its community, its country, its customers, and the environment.

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The Foreign Office and MI6 were chock-a-block with Cambridge and Oxford alumni. But the popularity of government jobs began to decline as society started deifying captains of industry. Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street served more as an inspiration than as the harsh critique the filmmaker intended. The lifestyle of Gordon Gekko and his real-life equivalents drew more young men (and it was overwhelmingly men) to the world of business and finance. Beginning in the 1990s, it became rare for graduates of the most prestigious universities to view government service as an attractive career. More often than not, they chose an investment bank, an elite consultancy, or a technology company.

Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

“Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” he said in January 2016. And then he paid homage to one of the most recognizable cultural touchstones about modern Wall Street when he referred to the famous “Greed is good” scene in Wall Street, the 1987 Oliver Stone film, where Gordon Gekko, played with oleaginous glee by Michael Douglas, lectures Bud Fox, his young and aspiring apprentice (played by Charlie Sheen). “So, to those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear,” Senator Sanders continued. “Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation…We will no longer tolerate an economy and a political system that has been rigged by Wall Street to benefit the wealthiest Americans in this country at the expense of everyone else.”

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

In humans, it involves the unique capacity to gather, store, and retrieve, exchange, integrate, and update, use and indeed misuse semantic information acquired by other people, including past generations. It is this social and economic sphere of information that will be explored in the next chapter. In Oliver Stone's film Wall Street (1987), the main character, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), declares that `the most valuable commodity I know of is information'. He was probably right. Information has always had great value, and whoever has owned it has usually been keen on protecting it. This is why, for example, there are legal systems regulating intellectual property.

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

But the damage had been done. The mood around the country turned decidedly anti–Wall Street as the junk bond scandals hit the front pages of newspapers. An October 1987 Newsweek cover queried, “Is the Party Over? A Jolt for Wall Street’s Whiz Kids.” In December 1987, audiences in movie theaters listened to Gordon Gekko, the slimy takeover artist played by Michael Douglas, proclaim the mantra for the decade in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: “Greed is good.” A series of popular books reflecting the anti–Wall Street sentiment hit the presses: Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Barbarians at the Gate by Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, The Predators’ Ball by Connie Bruck, Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.

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At the time, the quants were known as rocket scientists, since many came from research hotbeds such as Bell Labs, where cell phones were invented, or Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb. Wall Street’s gut traders eventually proved to be no match for such explosive brainpower. Michael Lewis’s Wall Street classic, Liar’s Poker, exemplified and exposed the old-school Big Swinging Dick trader of the 1980s, the age of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good.” Lewis Ranieri, the mortgage-bond trader made famous in the book, made huge bets based on his burger-fueled gut. Michael Milken of Drexel Burhman for a time ruled the Street, financing ballsy leveraged buyouts with billions in junk bonds. Nothing could be more different from the cerebral, computerized universe of the quants.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

This alone drew admirers, yet next to it sat an equally expensive LaFerrari, a $1-million McLaren, and a Maybach – a budget trolley in comparison, but still worth almost half a million US dollars. Together, the story reported, the cars helped to attract a crowd. This squad of horsepower and conspicuous luxury waiting on double yellow lines for its masters was not a sign of London bouncing back after the Great Recession. Nor was it the site of an annual meeting between Gordon Gekko, Sherman McCoy, Patrick Bateman, and their modern, real-life incarnations in the asset management industry. The owners were “wealthy individuals from the Middle East” who had airlifted their four-wheeled toys to London for a short stopover. It costs roughly $30,000 for a car’s return ticket with Qatar Airways, but considering that a customized paint job alone can exceed $40,000, probably no one complained.14 Stories like these get associated with capitalism.

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Like a Greek tragedy in which every actor acts rationally, if not morally, yet still produces a bad outcome, the sources of gray capitalism have been taking Western economies for a ride toward a growth tragedy. The financial sector in the Western world started to expand in earnest around 1980, part of a larger trend of intermediaries investing, advising, managing, and facilitating companies. Few characters have symbolized that early era of latter-day financial capitalism as much as Gordon Gekko, the villain of the 1987 movie Wall Street played by Michael Douglas. Barring his criminal behavior, Gekko is in several ways representative of the financial ecology that has grown in the past decades. The financial sector has expanded rapidly, and rewards its stars with exorbitant salaries. Total remuneration increased sharply and the sector’s share of all American corporate profits went from well below 10 percent in 1980 to almost 30 percent in 2012.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

“You had people in their thirties, through hedge funds and Goldman Sachs partner jobs, people who were making twenty, thirty, forty million a year. And there were a lot of them doing it. They started hanging out with each other. They became a pack. They started roaming the globe together as global high rollers and the differences between them and the rest of the world became exponential. It was no longer just Gordon Gekko. It developed into a totally different stratosphere.” — Ms. Peterson’s dinner party observations are borne out by the data. In America, the gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else has indeed developed into “a totally different stratosphere.” In the 1970s, the top 1 percent of earners captured about 10 percent of the national income.

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But at a moment of hyperinflation and slightly lower state interest rates, banking offered an opportunity to make the first big post-Soviet windfall. Even more important, the fortunes earned using state credits provided the future oligarchs with the capital and the connections to muscle their way into the real windfall, the 1995 loans-for-shares giveaway of Russia’s natural resources. Because of Gordon Gekko, Bendukidze missed out. — Soros learned about revolutions the hard way. He compares 2008, with its cataclysmic events and his survival of them, with 1944, when as a Jewish fourteen-year-old in Nazi-occupied Budapest he and his family eluded the Holocaust. The Soroses and their circle of friends had lived comfortable, largely secular lives before the Germans arrived.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Isaac Perlmutter, the CEO of Marvel Comics and a veteran of the Israeli Army, likened dealing with Icahn to negotiating with terrorists. Also like Trump, Icahn came to prominence in the roaring 1980s. As America’s preeminent corporate raider, he was part of the inspiration for the character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. When Oliver Stone was researching the film, he visited Icahn and borrowed one of Icahn’s observations for the Gekko character: “If you need a friend, get a dog.” (Icahn borrowed the phrase from Harry Truman’s description of life in Washington. It’s unclear whether Icahn also supplied the most memorable line in the film: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Private enterprise replaced communal action as the preferred way to change society. The free-loving flower children of the 1960s’ “Love Generation” had given way to the self-centered “Me Generation” of the ’80s and ’90s. Bob Dylan’s call to action “The Times They Are a-Changin’” had been superceded by Gordon Gekko’s mantra “Greed Is Good.”21 The national battle for civil rights for minorities was replaced by a demand for smaller government, states’ rights, and more individual rights. By the early 1990s, Taylor’s rule, showing the trade-off between interest rates and the rate of inflation, named after the Stanford economist John Taylor,22 came to replace the Phillips curve, the trade-off between employment and inflation, as the equation of choice for those running the economy.

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Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (2005–6). 16 Ben Bernanke, remarks at “A Conference to Honor Milton Friedman,” University of Chicago, Chicago, November 8, 2002. 17 Michael Kinsley (1951– ), American political journalist. 18 Michael Kinsley, “Greenspan Shrugged,” The New York Times, October 14, 2007. 19 Greenspan, Age of Turbulence, p. 68. 20 George H. W. Bush (1924– ), ambassador to the UN, director of the CIA, and 41st president of the United States (1989–93). 21 The “Greed Is Good” speech by Gordon Gekko, the hero of Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street, was based on a commencement address at the University of California, 1986, by the convicted inside-dealing stock trader Ivan Boesky, who said, “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” 22 John Brian Taylor (1946– ), American economist and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. 23 George H.

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

More generally, such opportunistic traders try to put on a position before something is broadly known and unwind the position when the information gets incorporated into the price based on the motto: Buy on rumors, sell on news. If you know a rumor to be true, then you could be engaging in illegal insider trading (as Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in the movie Wall Street). Whereas equity long–short managers often have more long positions than short, the reverse is true for dedicated short-bias managers. They use similar techniques as equity long–short managers, but they focus on finding companies to sell short.

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Indeed, many serious discretionary traders often analyze the historical performance of a trading idea before implementing it in large size. For example, in my interview with Lee Ainslie, he told me how his Maverick Capital has built a quantitative system that informs their fundamental process and helps manage the risk. Macro Strategies If Gordon Gekko was an equity trader in the movie Wall Street, the Duke brothers and Eddie Murphy were macro traders in the movie Trading Places, using futures markets to bet on the direction of orange juice prices. I divide macro strategies into global macro and managed futures. Global macro traders bet on economy-wide phenomena around the world.

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

.… Financiers who celebrate fast fortunes made while workers face stagnant pay and declining job security risk becoming targets for a growing dissent.” When, on the eve of Blackstone’s IPO four months after the party, new tax proposals were announced, they were immediately dubbed the Blackstone Tax and the Journal blamed Schwarzman, saying his “garish 60th birthday party this year played into the hands of populists looking for a real-life Gordon Gekko to skewer.” Schwarzman’s exuberance had put the industry, and himself, on trial. It was easy to see the sources of the fears. Private equity embodies the capitalist ethos in its purest form, obsessed with making companies more valuable, whether that means growing, shrinking, folding one business and launching another, merging, or moving.

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Hill had also been an architect of some of the most iconic friendly mergers of the age: Bendix Corp.’s $1.8 billion merger with Allied Corp. in 1983, American Stores’ $2.5 billion takeover of Lucky Stores in 1988, and Time Incorporated’s $14 billion merger with Warner Communications in 1989. He dressed the part to perfection, from his back-combed coif to his impeccably tailored Paul Stuart suits and tasseled loafers. Rumor had it that Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street was styled after Tom Hill. In 1993 Hill was ousted as Lehman’s co-CEO, and Blackstone soon tapped him to cohead M&A and assume Roger Altman’s mantle as a brand-name rainmaker. From the moment Altman left, Schwarzman and Peterson had searched doggedly for a worthy replacement, Schwarzman remarked when Blackstone hired Hill.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

A more definitive portrait of modern finance would probably be the movie Wall Street, which had a profound effect on the city’s business culture, although probably not the effect its heavy-handed lefty director Oliver Stone expected. While the rest of America understood Michael Douglas’s iconic Gordon Gekko character as a villain, and saw his famed “greed is good” speech as incisive satire, many aspiring Wall Street traders sincerely thought—and still think—that Gekko was the movie’s hero. In the early 1990s, Wall Street saw a massive influx of young Gekko wannabes who thought waiting any amount of time to get fabulously wealthy was for losers, or at the very least for people who had never read Sun Tzu.

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For a while, it looked as if Cohen himself might get away. In March 2013 the SEC settled insider trading charges with Cohen for $616 million, and Cohen was so depressed by the paltry fine (which was only a fraction of his rumored $8 billion personal fortune) that he immediately went out and bought a $155 million Picasso (Le Rêve) and a $60 million, Gordon Gekko–style beach house in the Hamptons (right next to his existing $18 million house on the same beach). But later in the year, SAC itself was criminally indicted on insider trading charges, and Cohen was also charged civilly by the SEC for failure to supervise in the Martoma case. As of this writing, it appears that at the very least, SAC will be shut down.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

As that tag line suggests, the lifestyles of the rich and famous shown on Leach’s program were nothing more than “wishes” or “dreams” for the typical viewer. However, the series supported one of the key tenets of the gospel of materialism—namely, “Greed is good,” as stockbroker Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) declares in the 1980s film Wall Street. During the economic crisis of the 2000s, in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Michael Douglas reprises his role as Gordon Gekko, who emerges twenty years later from prison and seeks to rebuild his career and repair his relationship with his daughter. She is engaged to a young, ambitious Wall Street trader with goals much like Gekko himself had when he became involved in chicanery resembling much of what has contributed to many of this country’s financial problems in the twenty-first century.94 Like the original Wall Street and other films such as the 1980s classic Bonfire of the Vanities, Wall Street 2 highlights price-tag framing: everything (and everybody) has a price, and the higher the price, the greater the zeal with which people will pursue wealth and power at any cost. 9781442202238.print.indb 48 2/10/11 10:46 AM Twenty-Four-Karat Gold Frames 49 Not only does price-tag framing tell media audiences how much the rich pay for their possessions, but it also may suggest that ordinary people can live like millionaires, even if on a reduced scale.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

The corporation went bankrupt. Dunlap was spared possible civil and criminal suits only after he agreed to pay penalties and restitution of fifteen million dollars.10 The history of the last two decades is littered with fallen idols who, like Dunlap, stridently asserted the primacy of wealth. Gordon Gekko, the antihero of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, famously proclaimed: “Greed is good.” Gekko was partly based on Ivan Boesky, a notorious corporate raider of the 1980s, who was reported as telling a class at Columbia: “I want you to know that I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”11 Soon after, Boesky went to prison, convicted of insider trading.

The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Susan Krakower, Mark Hoffman, Nik Deogun, Melissa Lee, Scott Wapner, Mary Duffy, John Melloy, Patty Martell, Lydia Thew, Gary Kaminsky, Maria Bartiromo, David Faber, Guy Adami, Joe Terranova, Tim Seymour, Amanda Drury, Carl Quintanilla, Jim Cramer, Brian Steel, Brian Sullivan, Maneet Ahuja, Pete and Jon Najarian, Steve Grasso, Steve Cortes, Karen Finerman, Brian Sullivan, Samantha Wright, and a legion of others who always make my time on the network a great learning experience. I also want to acknowledge my brother David; my sister Susan; my mom and dad, Al and Marie Scaramucci; the mother of my children, Lisa; and if you read my first book Goodbye Gordon Gekko, my first business mentor Uncle Salvatore Defeo, Sonny, Bobby, and Augie Defeo. If I have left anyone out, I offer an apology. The oversight, while unintentional, is more of a function of a publishing deadline and a warning by my publisher not to make this too long.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Tit for tat—Cooperate in the beginning and then copy what the opponent did in their last move. Spiteful—Cooperate until an opponent betrays and then always betray. Mistrust—Betray first, then copy opponent’s moves. In each of these strategies, you can see some very human responses or personas. They’re celebrated or vilified in our popular culture as well. On one side, we’ve got Gordon Gekko, the archetypical corporate raider in the 1987 film Wall Street, who famously said, “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the evolutionary spirit.” On the other side, we’ve got George Bailey, from the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, who epitomizes selflessness throughout the movie and is rewarded through positive relationships and a life lived well.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

The main plot points of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street were spot on: a superstar financial speculator engages in illegal inside trading, a predatory takeover strips a profitable company of its assets, and unionized workers are bamboozled into going along with a deal that will leave them without their good jobs and pensions. The corporate raider Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, does get his comeuppance in the end because his stockbroker, the Charlie Sheen character who provided him with the tradable inside information about his mechanic father’s airline company, flips on him. But Gekko is the star of the show, the exciting sexy late-model 1980s antihero.

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The changes were all of a piece and synergistic. Wall Street’s new hegemony was first enabled by Milton Friedman’s mainstreamed libertarianism and then reinforced it in turn—ditto with financialization and deregulation, the Law and Economics movement, the atrophying of antitrust, the lionization of guys like Jack Welch and Gordon Gekko, the digital revolution, increasingly short-term thinking, only the rich getting richer, and the explosion of corporate lobbying in Washington.*1 The Harvard Business School political scientist Gautam Mukunda has a lucid explaination for how extreme financialization happened. “Real power,” he wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review, comes not from forcing people to do what you want but from changing the way people think, so that they want to do what you want….The ability of a powerful group to reward those who agree with it and punish those who don’t distorts the marketplace of ideas….The result can be an entire society twisted to serve the interests of its most powerful group, further increasing that group’s power in a vicious cycle….In the United States…it’s…the financial sector—particularly Wall Street—that has disproportionate power….The financial system is the economy’s circulatory system.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

Buffett ran a small investment partnership out of a nondescript office building in Omaha and had no prior management experience. He was very different from the notorious LBO barons of the 1980s, however. First of all, he was not very hostile, having established a close relationship with the Chace family before making his move. Second, he didn’t use any debt—this was a long way from Gordon Gekko or Henry Kravis. Buffett had been attracted to Berkshire by its cheap price relative to book value. At the time, the company had only a weak market position in a brutally competitive commodity business (suit linings) and a mere $18 million in market capitalization. From this undistinguished start, unprecedented results followed; and measured by long-term stock performance, the formerly crew-cut Nebraskan is simply on another planet from all other CEOs.

Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

He argues that while regulations would help, a moral transformation and a renunciation of greed is what is really needed. As you read, consider the following questions: 1. According to Oskari Juurikkala, what are derivatives? 2. What act does Juurikkala explain was passed after Enron to create a new layer of regulations? 3. According to Juurikkala, what really destroyed Enron? “G reed is good,” insisted Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. Most of us disagree. Recent events in the mortgage lending industry prove us right. The “subprime loan crisis” has been making headlines since it began in August [2007]. It refers to the fact that a relatively high percentage of mortgages offered to people with significant probability of default have gone sour.

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

Of course, the villainous traits that Hollywood associates with the British are not exclusively typical of the nation. Other non-British characters in the afi’s Top 50, such as Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over 133 CELLULOID HEROES AND VILLAINS The Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975), Mr Potter (Lionel Barrymore in It’s A Wonderful Life, 1946), Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas in Wall Street, 1987) and Kaiser Soza (Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, 1995), have comparable characteristics. Indeed, it would be absurd to maintain that Hollywood regards the British as holding all the cards in the portrayal of villainy. All the same, it is striking that Hollywood repeatedly identifies the British, with their fancy accents, emotional reserve and public school demeanour as ‘naturals’ to play the part of the baddie.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

But the consensus among the business press and dozens of very bitter former executives is that the overriding cause of Sears’s malaise is the disastrous decision by the company’s chairman and CEO, Edward Lampert, to disaggregate the company’s different divisions into competing units: to create an internal market. From a capitalist perspective, the move appears to make sense. As business leaders never tire of telling us, the free market is the fount of all wealth in modern society. Competition between private companies is the primary driver of innovation, productivity and growth. Greed is good, per Gordon Gekko’s oft-quoted imperative from Wall Street. So one can be excused for wondering why it is, if the market is indeed as powerfully efficient and productive as they say, that all companies did not long ago adopt the market as an internal model. Lampert, libertarian and fan of the laissez-faire egotism of Russian American novelist Ayn Rand, had made his way from working in warehouses as a teenager, via a spell with Goldman Sachs, to managing a $15 billion hedge fund by the age of 41.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

In the deal the acquiring company would use the target companies’ funds to repay the debt it incurred to fund the takeover in the first place – ideally to Milken’s bank. Junk bonds became the weapon of choice of hostile raiders churning up and destroying companies in the process. A junk-financed buyout of a company would bring on job losses and restructuring.6 Gordon Gekko, the charismatic and ruthless character played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, is ‘part Milken’, according to one of the film’s producers. Drexel’s ability to swiftly raise vast sums for LBOs was lucrative. By 1986 Drexel was Wall Street’s most profitable firm and Milken its highest-paid executive: in 1986 the bank paid Milken nearly $295m ($665m in today’s money), the next year he was paid $550m (or more than $1.2bn today).7 But Drexel was feared and even loathed on Wall Street.

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle by Diana B. Henriques

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, British Empire, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, index fund, locking in a profit, low interest rates, mail merge, merger arbitrage, messenger bag, money market fund, payment for order flow, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, traveling salesman

With Madoff’s steady rates of return, Picower’s account balances ultimately ran up into the billions of dollars. As early as 1986 he was wealthy enough to invest $28 million in an arbitrage fund run by Ivan Boesky, the notorious trader who boosted his fund’s profits illegally by buying tips from Wall Street insiders and who was the model for the Gordon Gekko character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street. By the late 1990s, Picower’s trading account at Goldman Sachs—almost certainly just one of his many Wall Street brokerage accounts—was reportedly worth $10 billion. At one point, he arranged a $5 billion margin loan in that account, which indicates he was so rich that Goldman knew that he could easily cover the loan if the market turned against him.

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Lynch, Charles Colfer, and Tomas Kukla, “Flash: Rogerscasey’s Buy-Rated Hedge Fund Managers Have No Exposure to Madoff Investment Securities LLC,” Rogerscasey Inc. internal publication, December 2008. 132 Rogerscasey’s rating for the Madoff-related Tremont funds was “sell”: The warnings surfaced in the course of lawsuits filed in Colorado by Madoff victims against units of Fiserv that provided IRA custodial services to more than eight hundred retirement savings accounts invested with Madoff. 132 “The Madoff exposure is a potential disaster”: Lynch, Colfer, and Kukla, “Flash,” p. 2. 133 he invested about $620 million: Diana B. Henriques, “Deal Recovers $7.2 Billion for Madoff Fraud Victims,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 2010. 133 the model for the Gordon Gekko character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street: James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 202–3. Stewart noted that a Boesky aide, Reid Nagle, “had no idea where Picower’s money came from; he occupied an unmarked office suite in an anonymous Manhattan tower.” 133 Picower’s trading account at Goldman Sachs: Henriques, “Deal Recovers $7.2 Billion,” and reporting notes made available to the author by her colleague Peter Lattman. 133 Available records show that Picower and his wife withdrew $390 million: Jake Bernstein, “Madoff Client Jeffry Picower Netted $5 Billion—Likely More Than Madoff Himself,” ProPublica.org, June 23, 2009 (subsequently updated), and the accompanying graphic, Dan Nguyen and Jake Bernstein, “Chart: The Picower-Madoff Transfers, from 1995–2008.” 135 a posthumous memoir called Leukemia for Chickens: Roger Madoff, Leukemia for Chickens: One Wimp’s Tale About Living Through Cancer (New York: privately published, 2007). 135 One hospital staff member would poignantly recall Peter gently rubbing ointment: Ibid., pp. 273–74.

Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Self-awareness Part of the intent of this book is to make you more self-aware and more honest about your strengths and weaknesses as a trader. There is no shame in having low scores on some dimensions. Nobody possesses all positive characteristics in abundance. Better to admit that you are risk averse and trade accordingly than pretend your name is Gordon Gekko or Dollar Bill. The number one way to build and cultivate self-awareness is to maintain a trading journal. This is such a cliché of trading advice. That’s because it’s true. You can journal individual trades or individual days or just sporadic thoughts. Keep a document or spreadsheet open in the background and note what you are doing.

…

A full-sized basketball hoop with fiberglass backboard, right on your driveway? I want that! That goal (getting out of suburban Ottawa and into something exciting and new) had a huge influence on my perception of money as a giver of freedom and novelty, and kept the fire in my belly through late high school and university. My high school years were the days of Gordon Gekko and Wall Street (the movie) and after I read Liar’s Poker cover to cover at age 15, I knew what I wanted to do. My one and only goal was to become a trader on Wall Street136. I had a crystal-clear and laser-focused motivation: money. That singular focus was good. However, as I matured and built a decent life for myself and my family, money became less important.

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In the 2000s bankers did it again, amassing vast fortunes by making bad real estate loans and either selling them to unwitting investors or receiving a government bailout when crisis struck. But it’s also true of a lot of private equity, the business of buying companies, restructuring them, then selling them off again. (Gordon Gekko, in the movie Wall Street, was a private-equity player; Mitt Romney was one in real life.) To be fair, some private-equity firms have done valuable work by financing start-ups, in high-tech and elsewhere. In many other cases, however, profits have come from what Larry Summers—yes, that Larry Summers—called, in an influential paper of the same name, “breach of trust”: basically, breaking contracts and agreements.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

Commissioning the Crusader: Finding Your Queen Isabella If you are a Crusader, your ideal financial sponsor is someone whose horizon matches your own vision, with the temperament and patient capital to boot. You need investors whose role is more like the one Queen Isabella played for Christopher Columbus than the rapacious one Gordon Gekko displayed with his portfolio companies in the movie Wall Street. In other words, you want a sponsor more interested in long-term development than in short-term profit. To some extent, there is always tension between an early-stage venture capitalist’s desire for a timely exit and a founder’s quest to build a long-term, successful enterprise that grows well after the early supporters have cashed out.

The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better by Will Storr

data science, David Brooks, Demis Hassabis, Gordon Gekko, heat death of the universe, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Wall-E

THE ARGUMENT Increasingly, writers come to the course who are angry about something that’s happening in the world. They want to write a story that highlights some perceived societal problem. Say you’re angry about the US healthcare system, so you decide to write a kind of healthcare version of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. It centres on a Gordon Gekko type who ramps up the price of an essential medication. Fine. The risk is that, if you don’t do the necessary character work, ‘a healthcare version of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street’ is exactly what you’re going to end up with. No matter where your inspiration came from or what kind of story you want to write, I believe no harm can ever come from rewinding to character.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

The stock market allocates precious capital to companies it thinks can maximize profits and starves those that can’t. In other words, the stock market is democracy’s half-evil henchman, whose tool is the size of the carrot, not the use of the stick. The tenets of capitalism’s great economists, from Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand to Joseph Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction and Gordon Gekko’s Greed Is Good, are all powerful concepts, but it’s profits and the stock market that carry out the dirty work. No Five-Year Plans. All men are created equal, but a few of you need to be canned and retrained so progress can happen again. New industries get funded and start hiring again. But which ones?

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

However, not only has no such fall ensued but it turns out that these accounting scandals are a regular feature in the landscape of accounting. They are as old as the profession itself, dating back to the earliest days of the formalised use of collective capital: the corporation. Corporations and accounting scandals go together like Gordon Gekko and greed. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are rife with corporate collapses of the magnitude of Enron’s and comparable in their elements. And they all stem from significant accounting misstatements orchestrated by influential senior managers. Equally, the responses of lawmakers and watchdogs have been the same over the past one hundred years: tinker around the edges of the law, found new watchdogs, proclaim a new era of greater scrutiny and let accountants and auditors out to play with the managers of vast sums of other people’s money.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

Our total investment was more than $300,000. In crypto, everyone talks about whales, the ones with the massive number of coins. They are a mythical force, making loads of money by knowing what’s going to happen next. They move their huge stacks for maximum advantage while everyone else is in the dark. I always pictured them as Gordon Gekko or Mr. Robot. A mix of tech billionaires and cold-blooded traders, with maybe a few Russian oligarchs thrown in. I don’t think anyone thought it was a guy like me, sitting in his upstairs bedroom, buying more ETH than most people thought was prudent, then going downstairs and trying like hell to change the water filter in the refrigerator.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Inverting the title of William Wyler’s Oscar-winning film of 1946, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich surveyed the period and called it The Worst Years of Our Lives.5 If Wyler’s Best Years had seemed to capture the essence of the immediate postwar period, its 1980s counterpart was Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, released in 1987. Stone’s film centered on a cutthroat business executive, Gordon Gekko, who operated on the principle that “greed is good.” In comparison with Trump’s real-life brashness and extravagance, the celluloid Gekko looked like a piker. Like Gekko, however, Trump embodied values that seemed, at least for a moment, to express something essential about the United States. In October 1989, People magazine took a stab at explaining Trump’s standing in contemporary culture while hinting at its potential political implications.

Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins

delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, financial independence, follow your passion, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Own Your Own Home, passive income, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Stanford marshmallow experiment, time value of money, Walter Mischel

The rigid schedule—and with only a couple of weeks of vacation each year—would get in the way of all the other things I wanted to do. To be sure, I was young and had delusions of grandeur. But I was certain there was something much better out there for me. The movie Wall Street had come out when I was in college. Today most people kind of laugh at that movie: We deride the slick-haired Michael Douglas character, Gordon Gekko, who told us that “greed, for want of a better word, is good.” We all know where that kind of unbridled capitalism got our country. But at the time, the rich and freewheeling lifestyle that the movie portrayed really appealed to me. I sensed that the financial industry would give me the kind of freedom I wanted.

A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan by Ben Carlson

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, loss aversion, market bubble, medical residency, Occam's razor, paper trading, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto

Instead they were fighting the last war and investing through the rearview mirror instead of sticking to their investment policy guidelines. Risk management was secondary to chasing returns.9 Why does this type of behavior exist, from professionals down to the individual? In the classic movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas's character Gordon Gekko famously said, “Greed, for a lack of a better word, is good.”10 And while greed is said to be a driving factor in most financial decisions, envy can actually dissuade us from reaching our goals as well. In one study, Harvard researchers asked subjects if they would rather live in a place where they had income of $50,000, but the average person had an income of $25,000 or one where they have an income of $100,000 in a place where the average income was $200,000—assuming prices were constant in both examples.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Drexel found itself tangled in a web of allegations and investigations into insider trading. In 1986, Dennis Levine, a Drexel investment banker, was charged with insider trading. Drexel traders joked: “Anybody who had to do 54 trades to make $12 million couldn’t be any good.”44 Levine implicated Ivan Boesky, the model for Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. In 1986, Boesky had declared: “Greed is all right...greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”45 Boesky saved himself by cooperating with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and informing on Milken. The SEC and Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, launched wide-ranging investigations into Drexel’s operations.

…

Rupert Murdoch’s third wife, Wendy Deng, told a woman’s magazine that her husband, worth more than $8 billion, wore $9 shirts bought at U.S. discount store Wal-Mart. But Buffett and Murdoch also owned top-of-the-line business jets to ease the rigors of frequent business travel. The Physical Impossibility of Spending the Amount Earned by Someone Living Life imitated fiction as wealthy bankers mirrored Wall Street’s fictitious, art collecting villain—Gordon Gekko. Art was an alibi for networking, providing natural opportunities to meet members of the financial elite and identify deals. Hedge fund manager Steve Cohen was typical of new buyers who increasingly drove the market for high-end art. His $700 million art collection included Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It by Craig Brandon

Bernie Madoff, call centre, corporate raider, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, impulse control, new economy, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader

This tended to break down along age lines, with the older professors defending academic standards and the younger ones advocating dumbing down the college. It was at this crucial point that a new kind of administrator began taking over the reins of power at American colleges. These new administrators had more in common with Gordon Gekko than they did with Aristotle. They were armed with degrees in business administration rather than in education and had backgrounds or at least training in subjects like marketing, public relations, and management. These new administrators saw that the real problem with colleges was that they were not being run like what they really were—businesses.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Underperforming companies—those generating insufficient profits to satisfy shareholders—^were taken over, either by allegedly more competent rivals or by corporate raiders (or, as Alan Greenspan dubbed them at the time, "unaffiliated corporate restructurers"), or they were taken private by a management team in partnership with outside investors using lots of borrowed money. Regardless of the financial maneuver, the operational strategy was similar: shut or sell weak divisions, lay off workers, cut wages, break unions (where they existed), speed up the Hne, get the profit rate up. The moral philosophy of this period was nicely summed up by Oliver Stone's Gordon Gekko, channeUng the most famous inside trader of all time, Ivan Boesky: "Greed is good." Unfortunately, these maneuvers usually involved lots of debt, and the debt load proved crippHng by decade's end. So there was a shift of strategy toward shareholder activism. Led by large pension funds, particularly the CaHfornia PubHc Employees Retirement System (Calpers), institutional investors drew up hit lists of saggy companies, and pressed management to shape up or ship out.

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager by Lars Kroijer

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, family office, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Long Term Capital Management, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, NetJets, new economy, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

He was one of those people we minions knew to fear. He had since left Lazard and set up his own wealth-management firm next door. Entering Mr Totti’s lavish office, I thought I was in the movie Wall Street. Although I had heard of him terrorising associates, I had not imagined the mirror image of Gordon Gekko. At Lazard, he did not even deal with us analysts, who were one step too low for consideration, but left it to the associates, and I had therefore never met him. I felt as if he ought to launch into a tirade of abuse, calling me a useless piece of shit and how his two-year-old grandchild could do better financial models than me.

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Many critics of banks look wistfully back to a golden age of finance, when the bank manager was the gateway to credit, when judgment prevailed over equation-filled models. This was a world of conservatism and integrity, where taxpayers slept easy in their beds and bankers were more Jimmy Stewart than Gordon Gekko. Since then, modern finance has evolved toward replacing decentralized judgment by mechanical process and substituting relationship lending with arms-length transactions. You can apply for loans online in minutes without speaking to anyone. Thanks to securitization, your mortgage may no longer be owned by the bank you got it from.

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders by Kate Kelly

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alan Greenspan, Bakken shale, bank run, Bear Stearns, business cycle, commodity super cycle, Credit Default Swap, diversification, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, index fund, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, oil-for-food scandal, paper trading, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, the market place

The indoctrination was worse for Ruggles, though: his father was a professor of finance in Ohio and had actually researched the system as part of his living. In 1987, his father took him to see the movie Wall Street, the portrait of corporate greed starring Charlie Sheen as an ambitious young stock trader and Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, his sleazy, amoral business mentor. “We left the movie and we had very, very different views,” Ruggles remembers. “I had a hard time understanding that Gekko was the bad guy. I’m thinking, ‘This is what I want to do when I grow up.’” After graduating from what he joked was “the 200th best high school in Ohio” in the depressed steel town of Youngstown, Ruggles attended the University of Michigan, where he remembers maintaining a 4.0 for a while.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

At the time, it looked innocent enough. Greenspan gave us low interest rates. They dubbed it “lower for longer.” But this was really just lighter fluid on a fire. It told people to get greedy. I’m not talking about everyday risk taking and speculation, normal human greed. I’m not even talking about Gordon Gekko in the ‘80s. This is much more than “greed is good.” I’m talking about steal as much as you can, and if you’re wrong, we’ll bail you out. I’m talking about too big to fail and moral hazard. I’m talking about Rihanna playing to a bunch of hustlers at a mortgage convention boondoggle. “Does that mean that Greenspan caused it?”

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

The three-martini business lunch was consigned to history, as were many corporate cocktail cabinets. The new ethos was apparent in the 1985 movie Wall Street, a Faustian tale about Bud, a young stockbroker eager to share in the immense fortunes being made in the markets at that time. Bud solicits the attention of Gordon Gekko, a corporate raider, who epitomizes the new model capitalist. “Lunch is for wimps,” he declares at their first encounter, and Bud pointedly calls for Evian when he meets Gekko in a restaurant at night. The old order is represented by Bud’s father, a union leader at Bluestar Airlines, who does his business with the men he represents over a few beers in the local bar.

…

The old order is represented by Bud’s father, a union leader at Bluestar Airlines, who does his business with the men he represents over a few beers in the local bar. Gekko aims to take over Bluestar in order to break it into pieces and rob its pension fund, and Bud is forced to choose between old-fashioned beer-drinking, metal-bashing America and the greed-is-good philosophy of Gordon Gekko. After a bottle of whiskey he decides to do the right thing—intoxication leads to an epiphany that restores his moral perspective. There were genuine monetary benefits to be gained from alcohol-free workplaces. Companies that introduced such policies found their workers had fewer accidents, thus reducing insurance premiums and compensation payments, and that they had to sack fewer workers for drunkenness, enabling savings in termination costs and the expenses of recruiting replacements.

Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears by Frank Zammetti

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, corporate raider, create, read, update, delete, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, full text search, Gordon Gekko, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, leftpad, loose coupling, Ronald Reagan, web application

In the next chapter, the final chapter of this book, we’ve put together an application for tracking our finances that will allow us to see a few new capabilities that we haven’t seen before, including the charting capabilities Ext JS provides. Stick around—the final adventure is about to begin! 495 CHAP TER 9 Managing Your Finances: Finance Master t o quote the immortal words of Gordon Gekko:1 “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Greed probably most frequently comes in the form of money, so therefore money is good. A big part of making money is simply being able to track your assets and liabilities and understand where your money is and how it’s working for you in terms of return on investments.

…

There are some top-notch financial tracking/planning software products out there. Quicken is probably the most well-known name. That product is developed by a team of dedicated engineers and has been developed over a very long period of time to be the polished, powerful solution it is today. At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to the relatively simple 1 Gordon Gekko is the main antagonist in the classic movie Wall Street. Gordon, a corporate raider played by Michael Douglas, embodies all that was wrong with those involved in the stock market in the 80s (and now too it seems!). 497 498 Ch apt er 9 n Ma Na G ING YOU r FINa NC eS : F I N a N C e M a S t e r concept of a diary2 for your money!

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

But the fact that profit is natural and generally beneficial does not make it necessarily good, culturally speaking. Cultures can decide when natural things are good—and determine the degree of goodness—and when they are not. Greed is just as natural as profit but is not culturally good, contrary to what Gordon Gekko famously affirmed.2 — The most strangely ordered emergences of high faculties are probably feeling and consciousness. It is not unreasonable—just incorrect—to imagine that the mental refinement we know as feelings would have arisen from the most advanced creatures in evolution, if not from humans alone.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

“He says, ‘We’re a very hard-working place. There are no stretch limos outside. We’re very middle class. We work very hard. It’s all about the firm. It’s about partnership. It’s about teamwork. What we’re going to do is have an open bar, and we’d like all of you to come and have a drink with us.’ It sounded perfect to me. It wasn’t Gordon Gekko. I thought to myself, I gotta do this.” The next day, Bannon put on his best suit and headed over to the Goldman recruiting party, hoping to somehow inveigle his way into getting an interview. “I get there, and there’s like seven hundred people jammed into this tent,” he said. “I said, ‘Fuck it.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter

AOL-Time Warner, business process, cognitive dissonance, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, knowledge worker, loss aversion, shareholder value, zero-sum game

As I say, I don’t want to twist every comment we hear and make into knots. But self-deprecation, pseudo or otherwise, can be one of those honest feedback moments that makes a signal sound in our brain. “Pay attention,” it tells us. “This might be something worth observing.” 5. Look homeward. Remember the movie Wall Street and the character Gordon Gekko? Michael Douglas won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of this rude, larcenous wheeler-dealer. Well, I worked with a real-life investment banker who could have inspired the Gekko character. The man I coached—let’s call him Mike—wasn’t amoral and unethical like Gekko, but he had some competitive fires burning within his soul that made him treat people like gravel in a driveway.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

The movement represents a counterweight to the shareholder-centric ideas that Milton Friedman proposed in his essay in the New York Times Magazine back in 1970 and aims to undo a half century of corporate capitalism that has produced so many toxic, dysfunctional outcomes. Oddly enough, the social enterprise movement originated in business schools—the same places that were preaching the bible of Milton Friedman and producing miniature Gordon Gekkos for investment banks and management consulting firms. Terms like social enterprise and social entrepreneurship started kicking around in the 1970s, which was just as the Friedman doctrine began to be taught in business schools. That is probably not a coincidence. Nor is the fact that interest in social enterprise has suddenly soared in the past ten years, a period when the problems created by shareholder capitalism have become acute.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner offered a compelling view of interracial marriage, which at the time was intensely controversial (the year of the film’s release, interracial marriage was illegal in seventeen U.S. states). Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street opened up a public discussion about corporate greed, so much so that the lead character, Gordon Gekko, is frequently mentioned in the context of the current financial crisis. Films and books (like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird) and songs (like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”) that offer a meaningful critique of our culture help us progress and push the ball forward. Radical connectivity allows creative criticism of our culture to “go viral,” but such criticism doesn’t have the staying power of a big, blockbuster film or novel that changes the way a generation thinks about a subject or a topic.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

After three, Hill realized it could be a big business and told his boss so. Schwarzman asked Hill if he wanted to just run it himself. Hill, with his Harvard credentials and Lehman pedigree, looks the part of an investment banker. There’s long been a rumor on Wall Street that at least the physical elements of the Gordon Gekko character in the seminal movie Wall Street were based on Hill, who is an impeccable dresser and slicks his hair back to this day. He has built a similarly pedigreed group—seeing them in a room is like walking into a living Brooks Brothers calendar—that is charged with taking big slugs of money for clients and picking hedge funds based on their appetite for risk.

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

At the Goldman interview, I got into an argument about racism and raised my voice. Neither called me back. I settled on a position as a stockbroker with the brokerage firm Citibank Vickers. I thought the job would be the most exciting in the world. All of us in that generation had watched Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the blockbuster Wall Street memorably declare, “Greed is good.” But I soon discovered that being a broker wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. In Hong Kong, at least, it was about who, not what, you knew. If you had well-heeled contacts, you could make it. But as a junior broker with a limited social circle, I was always waiting for my boss to toss me trades that were too small or too tedious for him to execute.

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

As well as considerations of a humanitarian nature, he should recognize that the function of food is to give the worker' s body an injection of energy which will allow him to replenish that consumed by physical and mental effort, and to achieve and maintain as high a point as possible in the production curve, which as we know descends quickly when the worker has exhausted his reserves of energy. The sacrifice of food to work reaches its apotheosis in the 1 980s. In Oliver Stone ' s movie Wall Street, thrusting broker Gordon Gekko utters the immortal line: ' Lunch? You gotta be kidding. Lunch is for wimps. ' Lunch meant wasting an hour which could be better spent working. Sociability and pleasure were off the menu. Lunch had been sacrificed to the great gods of work, progress and ' beating the other guy ' . No one has the time to eat at leisure, it seems.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain. This is pure social Darwinism: self-interest is moral, interference (particularly governmental interference) with self-interest is evil, a fancy version of the Gordon Gekko pabulum that “greed is good.” When you dig deeper into Rand’s philosophy, you keep coming up with more of the same. Rand’s belief system is typically broken down into four parts: metaphysics (objective reality), epistemology (reason), ethics (self-interest), and politics (capitalism). The first two parts are basically pure bullshit and fluff.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

It suffered from the flaw that in a society marked by an uneven distribution of income favouring a numerically small elite, the rich had plenty of spending power to satisfy their desires, but not enough buying power to dynamise the economy to its full potential to raise real incomes.8 The German sociologist and economist Werner Sombart nonetheless argued two centuries later that luxury played an important part in the development of capitalism. 9 And Mandeville’s point has trickled down through history. To name just one example, Gordon Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ speech in the film Wall Street clearly descends in a direct line from the author of the fable. The Fable of the Bees was not universally admired by other Enlightenment thinkers. Adam Smith could not bring himself to accept the extremity of Mandeville’s paradox, in which vice was a necessary condition of prosperity.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, medical residency, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Quicken Loans, risk free rate, Robert Bork, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, the new new thing, too big to fail, value at risk, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

He traded bonds for Deutsche Bank, but, like most people who traded bonds for Deutsche Bank--or for Credit Suisse or UBS or one of the other big foreign banks that had purchased a toehold in the U.S. financial markets--he was an American. Thin and tightly wound, he spoke too quickly for anyone to follow exactly what he was saying. He wore his hair slicked back, in the manner of Gordon Gekko, and the sideburns long, in the fashion of an 1820s Romantic composer or a 1970s porn star. He wore loud ties, and said outrageous things without the slightest apparent awareness of how they might sound if repeated unsympathetically. He peppered his conversation with cryptic references to how much money he made, for instance.

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Copyright Office observed, “licensors have rarely turned down the opportunity in the digital age to seek royalties, even when the basis for their requests is weak at best. Online music companies rightly complain that they need certainty over what rights are implicated and what royalties are payable so that they can operate without fear of being sued for copyright infringement.”15 Greed is not good, as Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko once argued in the movie Wall Street. Obstructionists in the music industry would do well to follow the advice of another movie character: actor Alec Baldwin’s character’s Blake in David Mamet’s 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross. Sent in by corporate headquarters to motivate real estate salesmen, he harangues them about going after prospective buyers: “They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money.

Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio by Sal Arnuk, Joseph Saluzzi

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bernie Madoff, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Gordon Gekko, High speed trading, latency arbitrage, locking in a profit, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, National best bid and offer, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, Sergey Aleynikov, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, zero-sum game

Considering that exchanges are based around the world, a recent MIT study found that the ultimate site may be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.14 Some exchanges make sure that each colocated customer receives equal amounts of connecting cable so that a server at the northeast corner of a facility has the same latency as one at the southwest.15 It appears that “fairness” and the equalization of market data speed among colocated firms is a critical “must” for the exchanges, but not so when it comes to institutional and retail investors. Private Data Feeds In the 1987 movie Wall Street, insider trader Gordon Gekko tells aspiring broker Bud Fox that “the most valuable commodity I know of is information.”16 This is still true today, particularly for the stock exchanges. Private data feeds consolidate an enormous amount of information and transmit it at speeds faster than the consolidated quote system. Exchanges say they make these feeds available to everyone.

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

“In the mercantile regulations… the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it.” It is clear from such statements that Smith most certainly does not think that greed will always lead to a good outcome. Fortunately, however, he does not believe that humans are entirely selfish by nature: he has a more complex account of human behaviour than the Gordon Gekko stereotype would allow. To be sure, he believed that people often do look out for themselves, but he maintained that this does not or should not come at the cost of disregarding others’ interests completely. This point is explored in the Lectures on Jurisprudence, the raw material for the Wealth of Nations.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

As an iconic Newsweek cover story put it, the yuppies had “marched through the ’60s, then dispersed into a million solitary joggers, riding the crests of their own alpha waves, and now there they go again, barely looking up from the massed gray columns of the Wall Street Journal, they speed toward the airport, advancing on the 1980s in the back seat of a limousine.” They weren’t necessarily Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a movie released in 1987, but Gekko was a distillation of their worst traits. Unlike earlier boomers, “they did not waste time ‘finding themselves’ or joining radical movements,” Ehrenreich writes. “They plunged directly into the economic mainstream, earning and spending with equal zest.”

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History by Alexis Stenfors

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, game design, Gordon Gekko, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, mental accounting, millennium bug, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Rubik’s Cube, Snapchat, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, work culture , Y2K

‘Many people, not only traders, can relate to the drama and characters in these stories, otherwise they would not be such universally popular films. They deal with power, guilt, humanity and morality, as in much of literature – in Dostoyevsky, Kafka … or in Heinrich Böll’s books, to mention one of my favourite German writers.’ To me, asking traders or rogue traders whether they identified themselves with Bud Fox or Gordon Gekko was like asking a policewoman whether she identified herself with Sarah Lund in The Killing or a policeman with Kurt Wallander in one of Henning Mankell’s crime novels. The interview never made it to print. I could have elaborated much more in my answer to the question, which was cleverly phrased to prompt me into explaining what really goes on in the mind of a rogue trader.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

When pros smell blood and expect some other fund to be a forced buyer or seller, they don’t hesitate to pile on and make a quick profit at the bleeding funds’ expense. Unlike the members of WallStreetBets, the people who make the big bucks on actual Wall Street care only about their own net worth. As the fictional Gordon Gekko put it: “If you need a friend, get a dog.” Plotkin at least had the good sense to play his cards close to his vest. When funds that have borrowed stock try to wriggle out of a trade that is going badly, their buying can send a signal to the market and pour gasoline on the fire. Then a short seller appeared on the scene who had made his career by being as loud as possible.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

When companies wouldn’t listen to their profit-hungry investors, the raiders would mount campaigns to replace directors, installing themselves or their cronies on the board, and then forcing the company’s hand. Their exploits were glamorized in films like Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas, playing the sneering Gordon Gekko, proclaims that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Private equity was booming, too. Buyout firms were acquiring companies with borrowed money, loading them up with debt, then slashing costs and wringing out every penny they could. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts took over RJR Nabisco and Ronald Perelman went after Revlon.

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

Meanwhile, Cerberus Capital, the private equity firm that bought Chrysler in 2007, escapes,49 while the American public is likely on the hook for ten billion or more.50 And the much larger and far more costly General Motors restructuring resulted in the U.S. taxpayers’ owning a majority of the company’s stock, a $50 billion investment so risky no one else would take it. HEDGE FUND HANDS IN OUR POCKETS In the auto sector, as elsewhere in American business, manufacturing is no longer seen as the royal road to riches. Eerily echoing the reviled Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s morality tale Wall Street, Ray Diallo, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, noted, “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around.” 2007 was the year many first learned 124 Carjacked the terms “predatory lending” and “hedge fund,” both of which have come to hit American car owners, not just home owners, with a vengeance.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

That amounts to very few elephant seals eating all the fish. FARMERS AND FINANCIERS The biggest seals work for banks. Banks pay enormous bonuses to draw the brightest MBAs or quantum physicists. These bright financiers, in turn, invent the fancy new products that make banking one of the most profitable endeavors in the world. Remember the eighties? Gordon Gekko sashayed across the silver screen. Ivan Boesky was jailed for insider trading. Michael Milken peddled junk bonds. In 1987 financial firms amassed a little less than a fifth of the profits of all American corporations. Wall Street bonuses totaled $2.6 billion—about $15,600 for each man and woman working there.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Output per hour worked grew a relatively sluggish 1.9 percent per year during this span.18 Instead, falling borrowing costs, as America emerged from the stagflationary 1970s and the high interest rates of the early 1980s, and low taxation on capital created a new boom in financial engineering: leveraged buy-outs, mergers and acquisitions, and other Gordon Gekko–like techniques. The basic principle was that companies would use cheap credit to borrow heavily against their assets and expected future revenue and then use the money either to buy other companies or to buy back the company’s own stock. Interest payments on the debt would then become tax-deductible, reducing the company’s effective tax burden under America’s relatively high corporate tax rates.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Diana Vreeland, the stylish editor of Harpers Bazaar and friend of Nancy Reagan, said of the times, “Everything is power and money and how to use them both … We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and luxury.”60 Right around the time of the Crash, the film Wall Street captured the feeling of the era. In a memorable scene, Gordon Gekko wants to buy a company and rises to speak to the shareholders: The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed – for lack of a better word – is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Another high priest of conventional wisdom, CNN’s self-described “centrist” David Gergen, declared, “We’ve got a horse race.” We didn’t, of course. Obama won with relative ease. But even if Romney had somehow found an advantage and won, the Gergens of the world wouldn’t have shed a tear: having a tax-slashing, leveraged buyout artist in the White House—a Mormon Gordon Gekko—would have been okay with most of these clowns. It was the ultimate demonstration of the Manufacturing Consent principle of a concocted, artificially narrowed public debate. We were meant to understand that the distance between Romney and Obama was vast, that much was at stake, and that the outcome was in doubt.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

A video, posted to the Greensill Farming Facebook page, opens with a shot of Lex, Peter, their brother Andrew and their parents, standing in front of a farm building under a sign for ‘Greensill Sweet Potatoes’. Everyone is in the bright yellow and blue overalls that all Greensill farm workers wear – except for Lex, who is in smart black shoes, grey slacks and a blue banker’s shirt with a white collar and white cuffs, like an Australian Gordon Gekko. On its website, Greensill Farming said it had grown from the original 66 acres managed by Lex’s grandfather to more than 8,000 acres. It grew more than 5 per cent of all the watermelons in Australia. Not everyone was happy with their progress. Some local farmers were upset that Greensill Farming used money from the finance business to expand aggressively, paying over the odds for vast tracts of land, then driving down the price for sweet potatoes, piling pressure on other farms in the area.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Fat Tony is the Brooklyn-born trader who, as his name suggests, operates from the gut. He uses intuition and a hard-won bullshit detector to repeatedly defeat the business-school elites with their Wharton degrees and gaudy mansions. Characteristically, he tilts toward the gritty, seedy side of Wall Street, part Gordon Gekko, part Al Capone. Nero Tulip—a thinly disguised Nassim Taleb—is the buttoned-down intellectual who designs a trading system that can never blow up. Like Taleb, Tulip is a mathematician with a specialty in statistics. Like Taleb, he becomes a floor trader on the Merc. Like Taleb, he moves to a New York investment firm.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

So the screenwriter is encouraged to include several scenes where the female executive’s steely exoskeleton cracks and audiences can glimpse the vulnerable softness underneath. Miranda Priestly, the Machiavellian editor in chief played by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, has a visible breakdown over her marriage before ultimately triumphing in the film. Compare that with another ethically dubious boss, Gordon Gekko, the oily financier played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street, who enjoys cult worship despite being a relentless and unrepentant crook. Alec Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” speech from Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the most glorious asshole moments in film history. But according to Bruzzese’s research, audiences would be less inclined to embrace a foulmouthed woman from downtown.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

The scary thought is that if we did the experiments with nonmonetary currencies that were not as immediately convertible into money as tokens, or with individuals who cared less about their honesty, or with behavior that was not so publicly observable, we would most likely have found even higher levels of dishonesty. In other words, the level of deception we observed here is probably an underestimation of the level of deception we would find across a variety of circumstances and individuals. Now suppose that you have a company or a division of a company led by a Gordon Gekko character who declares that “greed is good.” And suppose he used nonmonetary means of encouraging dishonesty. Can you see how such a swashbuckler could change the mind-set of people who in principle want to be honest and want to see themselves as honest, but also want to hold on to their jobs and get ahead in the world?

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

CHAPTER 10 I LOOK FORWARD ‘SELLING ENGLAND BY THE POUND’ ‘It is difficult, if not impossible, to combine the citizens’ rights and interests and the private enterprise’s interests, because the private enterprise aims at its natural and justified objective, the biggest possible profit.’ Joseph Chamberlain ‘Greed is good.’ Gordon Gekko The Upper Derwent Valley, Derbyshire. A fine, calm, April evening, the air warm and still, the kiss of breeze very welcome. The journey up here out of Manchester through the city’s weekday rush hour is never something you’d call pleasant; smothered in the damp armpit or bulky backpack of a fellow traveller on a stifling privatised train, or tail to tail in the fuming cars that crawl through the winding bottlenecks of the A57 to Glossop and Sheffield.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

Junk-bond king Michael Milken pocketed over one billion dollars in compensation between 1983 and 1987 before securities violations related to an insider trading investigation landed him in jail. Others joined him, including investment banker Martin Siegel and trader Ivan Boesky, who exchanged both takeover information and briefcases packed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in neat stacks of $100 bills.1 By 1989, Gordon Gekko, the protagonist in the movie Wall Street, had come to define the business’s aggressive, cocksure professionals, who regularly pushed for an unfair edge. Berlekamp was an anomaly in this testosterone-drenched period, an academic with little use for juicy rumors or hot tips. He barely knew how various companies earned their profits and had zero interest in learning.

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

Stathakis Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. “I create nothing, I own.” - Gordon Gekko in the film “Wall Street,” 1987 Table of Contents FORWARD: THE BATTLE TO WRITE THIS BOOK THE BILLION DOLLAR EPIPHANY FROM BAYSWATER TO PRINCETON MY SON, THE OPTIONS BROKER FIRST STRIKES: CONTROLLING THE DESTINY OF COMPANIES TALK LIKE A POPULIST, ACT LIKE A RAIDER “FEAR OF GOD” GAMBIT MEETS THE “STIFF-ARM DEFENSE” GETTING RICH IN THE EIGHTIES: LIKE “TAKING CANDY FROM A BABY” PHILLIPS PETROLEUM MEETS THE “BARBARIANS FROM HELL” ICAHN VS.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It was the age of Clinton and Blair, who continued much of the market deregulation that had started under Reagan and Thatcher. It was a period when the last vestiges of the labor movement and the old-fashioned notion of retiring comfortably with a gold watch and a pension began to slip away, replaced by the glamorization of Gordon Gekko and soccer moms reading Money magazine and hoping to become stock-picking millionaires overnight. Wall Street guys were raking in money, but not nearly as much as the Silicon Valley geeks who had the trappings of money, and yet also somehow a greater sense of having earned it, by creating real value in the form of their companies.

Madoff Talks: Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History by Jim Campbell

algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, currency risk, delta neutral, family office, fear of failure, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, Jim Simons, margin call, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, time value of money, two and twenty, walking around money

I remember we met Bernie. We met his son who later committed suicide. The son was a little bit of a ‘toolbox,’ but I guess he was nice enough. It was spic and span; you could’ve eaten off the floor. Bernie seemed very down to earth and a nice guy. He could’ve been anyone’s Jewish grandpa. He definitely wasn’t a Gordon Gekko. I think Bernie was content to live in the shadows. I would never expect that he would have had all these millionaire friends trusting him with their life savings. Not that I would have trusted him or not trusted him. I don’t trust anybody, but that’s because of my job.”42 Now a chief compliance officer at a Wall Street firm, my source described the investigative structure of FINRA.

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

The other is, Protecting the environment is nature’s way; we humans had better shape up. The opposing theory of the selfish gene has been bitterly attacked out of the fear that it vindicates the philosophy of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: greed is good, greed works. Then there are those who believe in selfish genes but urge us to face up to the sad truth: at heart, Mother Teresa is really selfish. I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science. Surely paving Yosemite is unwise, Gordon Gekko is bad, and Mother Teresa is good regardless of what came out in the latest biology journals. But I suppose it is only human to feel a frisson when learning about what made us what we are.

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centralized clearinghouse, clean tech, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, Easter island, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

I suggest—and I know this is heresy—that Milton Friedman was at the heart, along with a generation of economists and bankers who have blindly followed his mantra: “Business exists to make a profit.” Really? This credo is at the heart of the world view that I’ve already written about—the fundamentally flawed paradigm, the mind-set that underlies the industrial system—and I suggest that that same mind-set also underlies the global financial system. I further suggest that Gordon Gekko’s fictional proclamation in the film Wall Street, “Greed is good,” is as widely accepted as Friedman’s credo, one hand-in-glove with the other, throughout the high-flying financial world. That’s a real double whammy! So, with trillions of dollars seeking instant gratification in short-term profits, with the financial industry coming up with ever-more esoteric and risky ways of satisfying that demand, with a ratings industry turning a blind eye to risk and stamping triple-A on too many pieces of paper (because if one agency didn’t, another would), something had to give, and it did.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

More than three hundred people showed up, each contributing $2,300. The event included a private reception with Obama for another dozen people who had raised more than $25,000 each for his campaign. That Paul Tudor Jones would be shaking the Greenwich money tree for Obama is not as odd as it looks. Jones isn’t a Gordon Gekko c02.indd 34 5/11/10 8:51:53 AM what’s the matter with connecticut? 35 kind of Wall Streeter. He has long been involved in social causes and in more than a passing way. He was a cofounder of the Robin Hood Foundation, one of the largest antipoverty groups in New York City. He personally underwrote many of Robin Hood’s administrative expenses, so that the group could claim that 100 percent of the contributions would go directly to help New Yorkers in need.

Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, East Village, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

All those morally strong boys and girls, all those international flags hanging amid the Gothic architecture. I curl up in my old Soviet comforter as Mama and Papa launch new fusillades downstairs. What kind of a person would I be if I went to a place like Grinnell? What if I jettisoned all of it, foreigner, Gnu, Gordon Gekko wannabe? What if I started from nothing? Am I crying because of the razvod downstairs? Am I crying because I can’t wait to be loved for the little nub inside me, whatever it may contain? Or am I crying because, in a sense, I know I’m about to commit an act of suicide, an act that will take me fully through my twenties and thirties, fully through a decade of psychoanalysis, to complete?

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Few people, even among the most ardent fans of market solutions, will disagree with the proposition that the financial markets have, from time to time, brought scandalous demonstrations of greed. While most traders earning multimillion bonuses no doubt think of themselves as upstanding citizens, the rest of us find it hard to find many shining examples of virtuous behavior on Wall Street or in the City of London. In the notorious words of cinema villain Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas in Wall Street), “Greed is good” is the motto of the markets, but not of Main Street. Likewise, the cartoon “rational economic man” is a selfish being, whereas real people make choices motivated by the moral sentiments of Adam Smith and illuminated by modern evolutionary biology.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Perhaps some moments of pleasure came from purchasing each white sweater, a happiness that probably dissipated soon after the sweater had disappeared into the white-sweater drawers. As one wise person said, you can never get enough of what you don’t really want. Greed is another component of our irrational and addictive relationship with money. “Greed,” said Gordon Gekko, the wheeler-dealer in the movie Wall Street, “is good.” It is, indeed, a socially acceptable and even encouraged motivation. Along with its dark cousin, fear, it runs the casino called Wall Street and gets reported on in the most respectable journals and newspapers in the world. Greed is also what possesses so many of us as we shoot right past the peak of the Fulfillment Curve and accumulate clutter (hoarding).

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

This might have been one of the first times anyone actually tied the consolidated feed to an expert system. Lew Roth joined me in trying to get this collection of buggy stuff to do something useful. Our modest efforts at a prototype were immodestly called the ART Quotron Universal Investment Reasoning Engine—AQUIRE, which had a nice Gordon Gekko feel to it (even though the actual Gordon was a year away, in 1987). As it turned out, the “Universal Investment Reasoning” demonstrated in AQUIRE consisted of variations on xxx Introduction crossover rules—comparisons of moving averages. These seemed to be a favorite of the New York visitors, and were easy to program.

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

Most, if not all, of those dreams spring from the premise that our discoveries will transform how we live. Recently I had a depressing revelation. It was about firsts. The first cell phone looked like a large brick. You see it and you think, Did people actually hold this up to their ear? Remember the 1987 movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko, the rich guy, at his beach house in the Hamptons, talking on one of those phones? I remember thinking, Wow, that’s cool! He can walk on the beach and speak to somebody on a portable phone! But now when I look back, all I can think is, How could anybody have ever used such a thing? This is the evidence that we’ve moved on: you look at the first thing—the brick-size cell phone, the car with the little crank, the airplane that looks like a cloth-wrapped insect—and you say, “Put it in a museum.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Assuming a 3 percent commission, your agent can make $8,400 for doing virtually nothing or $9,600 for doing many weeks of work. Which would you choose? On the buy side or the sell side, your agent’s most powerful incentive is to get a deal done, whether it is at a price favorable to you or not. Economics teaches us how to get the incentives right. As Gordon Gekko told us in the movie Wall Street, greed is good, so make sure that you have it working on your side. Yet Mr. Gekko was not entirely correct. Greed can be bad—even for people who are entirely selfish. Indeed, some of the most interesting problems in economics involve situations in which rational individuals acting in their own best interest do things that make themselves worse off.

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game