Goldman Sachs On Wall Street

Overview of the Case: The Securities and Exchange Commission claims Mark D. Begelman misused proprietary information regarding the merger of Bluegreen Corporation with BFC Financial Corporation. Mr. Begelman allegedly learned of the acquisition through a network of professional connections known as the World Presidents’ Organization (Maglich). Members of this organization freely share non-public business information with other members in confidence; however, Mr. Begelman allegedly did not abide by the organization’s mandate of secrecy and leveraged private information into a lucrative security transaction. As stated in the summary of the case by the SEC, “Mark D. Begelman, a member of the World Presidents’ Organization (“WPO”), abused

Based on the information presented in the PBS documentary and the TIME article, describe how the behaviors of corporations, such as Ford, Firestone, and the financial institutions on Wall Street, could or should be understood as crime whether or not they have been prosecuted? How do these activities differ from those involved in “typical” street crimes?

Enron’s ride is quite a phenomenon: from a regional gas pipeline trader to the largest energy trader in the world, and then back down the hill into bankruptcy and disgrace. As a matter of fact, it took Enron 16 years to go from about $10 billion of assets to $65 billion of assets, and 24 days to go bankruptcy. Enron is also one of the most celebrated business ethics cases in the century. There are so many things that went wrong within the organization, from all personal (prescriptive and psychological approaches), managerial (group norms, reward system, etc.), and organizational (world-class culture) perspectives. This paper will focus on the business ethics issues at Enron that were raised from the documentation Enron: The Smartest Guys

Jordan Belfort is the notorious 1990’s stockbroker who saw himself earning fifty million dollars a year operating a penny stock boiler room from his Stratton Oakmont, Inc. brokerage firm. Corrupted by drugs, money, and sex he went from being an innocent twenty – two year old on the fringe of a new life to manipulating the system in his infamous “pump and dump” scheme. As a stock swindler, he would motivate his young brokers through insane presentations to rile them up as they defrauded investors with duplicitous stock sales. Toward the end of this debauchery tale he was convicted for securities fraud and money laundering for which he was sentenced to twenty – two months in prison as well as recompensing two – hundred million in

| #3 Paper- Case study: What is Up With Wall Street? The Goldman Standard and Shades of Gray

shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 25 years, or both.

The first grey area was Goldman Sachs using a technique called “layering”. Goldman would start a company and used their own money to buy 90% of the shares. The public would see how the stocks were selling so quickly and wanted a piece of the pie. The public were unaware that Goldman was buying their own stocks and then continuously increasing the price of the stock and selling it back at the higher price. Goldman saw how well this was working and decided to continue with this practice. He started new companies and followed the same formula as before, making bags of money, while investors had no idea

Goldman Sachs” is deviance. In our lecture about “deviance” we had a variety of definition for deviance one of them being “behavior that violates social norms in a given society or group”. We discussed how “ what is deviant in one society or group maybe “normal” behavior in another group”. In the article “People vs Goldman Sachs” you can clearly see that Wall Street employees didn’t see any wrong in their actions. In fact, they believed that they believe they’re being trialed because their bank was successful at making money. So, they played the “you’re just mad because I’m successful card”. Deviance leads them into believing that their behavior was okay and that they weren’t doing anything

Marco Cabral Professor Henry Introduction to Literary Study May 16th, 2018 The Power Struggle “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” by Herman Melville shows through one character, Bartleby, symptoms of depressions, and lack of communicational skills which seems to take control of an office while showing a character, the Lawyer, who is successful, powerful, and safe man on Wall street who seems to start losing his power and control. Throughout the story the Lawyer starts to lose his power and his control over his employees and there is a constant power struggle to maintain that control between him, and his newly hired employee, Bartleby. Melville starts the story by giving the reader an impression of a reliable narrator, The

“I am not in this world to live up to other people 's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine”, states Fritz Pearls in the “Gestalt Prayer”. As a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Pearls’ quote casts a spot light on social awareness versus self- independence and nonconformity. Similar to the short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1853 by Herman Melville. The narrator, is an elderly lawyer with a small time firm who hires a scrivener named Bartleby. In the beginning Bartleby does the work asked of him by the lawyer but as time progresses he stops working completely using the phrase “I would prefer not to” as a form of negligible defiance. As a result of Bartleby’s consistent refusal to complete various tasks and to leave the establishment the lawyer is forced to move his practice elsewhere. The lawyer returns to find that Bartleby was labeled as a vagrant and removed from the office by law enforcement. The lawyer’s strange obsession with Bartleby drives him to visit him in the tombs that have become his prison. As he continued his defiance in the form of refusal of food, he soon dies from starvation.

Buying influence or engaging in conflicts of interest: Goldman engaged in activities were the companies and their customers’ interest conflicted. Still they moved forward in making money off them. Also, although not specifically stated on the case, the fact many formers Goldman executives held government positions proved to be a conflict of interest itself. Some of those people still had strong relations within Goldman and it can be said that one way or the other Goldman took advantage of that.

Wall street is said to be the home of the New York Stock Exchange; the New York stock exchange the world’s largest stock exchange by total market capitalization according to Forbes magazine. Major exchange has had or has also their headquarters in the Wall Street area and this includes NASDAX, The New York Board of Trade, and New York Mercantile Exchange. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a global protest movement against Social and Economic inequality with the primary goal to make the economic and political relationships in the society more equitable distribution of wealth and less vertically hierarchical. This movement, which is a global movement, which has reached nearly every continent in the last year, started September 17,

People who work on Wall Street are considering elites of the society, their works relate to finance and deal with the world economy. Many students desire for working on Wall Street; however, this dream is hard to accomplish because this job is for people who are considered “smart”. In Biographies of Hegemony, the author Karen Ho brings up the idea of smartness, which addresses to people not only have individual intelligence, but also have the quality of being an expert and has self-confidence, aggressive, and hard-working. Basically, in the article, Ho talks about students graduate from Harvard or Princeton and now they are working on Wall Street. Ho believes smartness is a form of impressiveness because smartness is not just about intelligence, but also a way to separate away from normal people. However, in Project Classroom Makeover, the author Cathy Davidson pays more attention to students who may not be the expertise, but they will use collective learning to share different opinions. Collective learning brings out the idea of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a group of people share ideas and solve problems, which is one way of collective learning. The theory of smartness shares commons and differences with collective learning. For common, both smartness and collective learning require students to work together and have the confidence to conquer the difficulties, which lead students to the future success. For differences, smartness is associated with students who have an

In 1938, and in the teeth of the longest and fiercest depression that the United States had ever known, capital spending hit an all time high. That’s right! In 1938 the men who owned America began to pour millions of Dollars into new plant and equipment as if there was no tomorrow. We don’t think much about it today, because it has been a long time since the United States has experienced a real bone jolting economic slowdown. The fact is, however, that the very best time for the industrialist to invest in new technologies is in the middle of a depression. This is because it is at such times that labor, raw materials, and new equipment can be purchased at rock bottom prices. Henry Ford may have jumped the gun a bit. He shut down his River

Wall Street can have a heavy influence on a company such as Enron's ethical standings. During the Enron debacle, Wall Street played a key role in the decision-making process for the leadership team of Enron. Wall Street roles in determining Enron's overall value as the company influenced Enron to push the boundaries of ethical standards. During the trial of Enron's executive's former Internet division chief of Enron Ken Rice testified: "That he and his co-conspirators chose to lie about their network's capabilities to gain credibility on Wall Street and boost Enron's stock value." (Flood, 2005) Enron's decision to inflate their values to Wall Street did exactly what the company executives wanted and the company's stock value skyrocketed. "Wall Street obediently obliged, inflating Enron's share value by as much as 75% from the time the company started bragging about its prospects." (Lashinsky, 2001) When Enron's bubble finally burst and