Money Never Sleeps: Will Greed Always Prevail??

It has been more than 20 years since the words "Greed is good" has been used on the big screen yet those three words still echo across Wall Street in light of the recent financial meltdown. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was released at many theaters last night at 12AM. I was ambitious enough to make the midnight showing along with many others, as it seemed like I had been counting down till the arrival of Santa for the past months. The trailers have aired for weeks and many people question whether the sequel can live up to the hype as well as the original. This is one sequel more powerful than the first and not to be missed. The movie is symbolic in many aspects, of which I will not give away, but the underlying theme is greed and whether it should exist. Oliver Stone does a phenomenal job of portraying greed as the villain that is passed on from person to person. Greed is something that we as humans can't just shake off. It's everywhere and lies within everyone. Greed has the ability tear people apart with temptation, as Stone portrays so well in Shia LaBeouf's character Jacob Moore. Jacob must choose between greed and power, and the love of his life. After going through the recent financial meltdown as well as reading multiple books, the movie seemed all too real, as if I were reliving the past few years. I thought to myself, the is the Lehman Brothers disaster all over again. Casting real life experts such as Nouriel Roubini, Anthony Scaramucci, Maria Bartiromo, and even Warren Buffett, help make the movie even more real. As most know, the financial crisis plays a big role in Oliver Stone's latest masterpiece. After seeing the movie, I had to ask myself, have people really changed? Have we learned from our mistakes? Or will this greed become a cycle as we will have to cope with disaster every few years. A message in the film is that the financial crisis can happen again, as little has changed from two or three years ago. There will always be Gordon Gekko's out there, as he still acts as a role model for some bankers. We will always have managers and executives pushing the limits of leveraging, especially when it is not their own money. In the movie, Gordon Gekko discusses that CDOs, CDS, and ABSs never existed before he went to prison. People are always creating new mechanisms to hedge and make money. As Gekko says it so eloquently, "Money is the bitch that never sleeps."