The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

Wall Street in 2003 was a very different place from the world Ben Graham had written about in his 1934 Security Analysis. 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.