Wall Street: The Topic Is Greed
The subject is greed--the driving force of the 1980s.
The big greed picture--savings and loan failures and junk bond tragedies--has been covered exhaustively in magazinedom. Now periodicals are picking up on some of the smaller scale human tales in which this offense figures as a prime motive.
The June Manhattan Inc, for instance, presents an intriguing inside look at Wall Street by tracing the helter-skelter career of one Eddie Braverman, a stockbroker who, according to the magazine, brazenly defrauded and duped customers and employers alike.
Braverman’s salesmanship is legendary on Wall Street, as are the bad checks he wrote to everyone from brokerage houses to the mortician who buried his mother. Yet, as contributing editor Michael Lewis writes, “Wall Street saw something in Eddie that it liked.”
Indeed. By one estimate, Braverman got himself hired by 44 Wall Street firms, including some of the best known in the business. And once the Securities and Exchange Commission is through with him, once his trial for bouncing bad checks is behind him, he may well wind up selling stocks for some Wall Street firm again, promising his bosses and customers he’ll make them rich.
Why? “It’s all about mutual greed,” Braverman said.
In the film “Wall Street,” the Michael Douglas character argues that greed is a good thing, the lubricant of industry. Charles Peters, editor in chief of The Washington Monthly, disagrees.
“Why do the rich want to be so rich? Why did money get to mean so much in our society? How did nice guys come, in the ‘70s and ‘80s to behave in increasingly selfish and greedy ways?” Peters asks in the June issue.
His answer is not terribly satisfying. After World War II as folks moved to the suburbs and got educated on the GI Bill, he explains, class mobility became a fixation and taste became the means of achieving that goal.
“It was easier to demonstrate taste by buying the right things” than by acquiring a thorough knowledge of art and literature, he says. So, “as people began to compete in the expression of good taste, money began to matter.”
Add to this the fact that corporations started moving their employees around the country like pawns on a chessboard and it’s no wonder that the American public began to resemble one great game show audience clamoring for more and more cash and material prizes.
“Not being a part of a community led to the need to establish one’s identity by proving taste, which led to the need for more and more money, which led to corruption, which was justified because you weren’t part of the community,” he says.
Peters doesn’t convincingly explain how 20th-Century American greed is different from the greed of medieval clerics. How is it different from “the worship of material luxury and wealth which constitutes . . . the ‘spirit’ of our age” which psychologist William James denounced 100 years ago?
Peters does offer suggestions on how to get Americans to reconsider their aversion to redistribution of wealth. One key to getting the well-off to cough up more tax money, he argues, is simply to make snobbery unfashionable.
“What we most need now,” he says, “is a Spy magazine that frees itself from trying to be part of an exclusive club and instead is totally devoted to ridiculing the idea that money proves taste and that taste proves class, or that class is even important.”
REQUIRED READING
“Hypochondria is never a pretty sight, and spiritual hypochondria--that fussing and brooding over one’s psychic health--is no exception.” So begins The American Spectator’s excellent and acerbic critique of co-dependency, a pop-psychological movement that seems to have gone stir crazy.
