Wall Street In America

Greed is an intense and selfish desire for something such as power, wealth or food.’ We have all heard the stories of the stockbroker that stole millions of dollars of their client’s money for personal use, or men that were able to take down large public traded corporations by falsifying the books and pocketing large sums of money. Greed has always existed among people; there are stories that date back to the Ancient Roman Empire. There are movies and books written about greed, Wolf of Wall Street is a famous one based on a true story. The main character Jordan is a stockbroker that figured out how to beat Wall Streets rules and regulations. He would become one of the riches men to ever work on Wall Street. Why are people so greedy? Is greed

Wall Street has been touted as one of the most accurate portrayals of Wall Street culture and recently spawned a sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. The character of Gordon Gekko and his obsession with greed is still prevalent today, especially during the fall of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns in 2008. Many of the executives of those firms as well as Wall Street executives in general were referred to as being the “Gordon Gekkos” of our generation. Most news coverage regarding government intervention in the economy has been about Wall Street intervention as of the past few years.

The Great Depression transformed American society and the way people thought about themselves and their relationship to the country. During this horrendous time period, many people lost many important pieces in their lives like money and jobs. Millions of families lost their savings as many banks collapsed in the early 1930s. They were unable to make rent payments or mortgage and many were removed from their apartments. The Great Depression challenged American families in vital ways, placing great economic demands upon families and their members.

Many americans were affected by the crash because they depended on the stock market. The banks suddenly started to fail also, after the stock market crashed. Some banks started to shut down. The industrial production dropped by half. The farmers could not sell any crops because the prices had to increase. In 1930, the first banking panics began. President Hoover wanted support the falling industry and banks. He tried hard to make loans and help the country. The crash of the stock market was only the beginning of the great depression. Banks were forced to closed, causing clients to lose money and income, making them have a hard time. They had to figure out how to keep up with their incomes and wages. How to help out their family. They lost their jobs and that made it difficult for them to pay their needs. While the jobs became more scarce, unemployment was abundant. The great depression also cause other types of people to become unemployed.

    The Great Depression significantly affected Americans lives, and even everyday activities. The unemployment rate reached an all time high for this time period. Instead of waking up to go to work, Americans were forced to search for jobs all day long because workplaces could not afford to to keep people employed.

The worst form of wilding carried out by the biggest Wall Street banks during the Great Recession is institutional wilding. According the Derber, institutional wilding is a form of self-indulgent behavior committed “by corporation, governments, churches, or other institution” Derber, p. 11). The Great Recession is also attributed to the corruption of mortgage company Countrywide Financial Corporation, Wall Street broker, bank investment Merrill Lynch and insurance company AIG. The banks perform poorly however the government also contributed to the Great Recession. For example, Countrywide Financial Corporation is one of the largest mortgages and was offering people loans will high potential risks. Countrywide offered subprime lending, which

The first way lives were affected during the Great Depression was how families survived. William Loren Katz, in his book An Album of The Great Depression, writes, “In Chicago a government committee discovered this scene at the city dump: when a garbage truck pulled up to unload, thirty-five men, women, and children began digging through the garbage with sticks and hands to find food... Finding jobs was next to impossible, gathering on street corners was easy, and stealing was tempting. Threatening young people with jail was useless because it’s what they wanted” (Katz 50). These families were so desperate to get food that they were willing to do anything for even the smallest scrap.

Many were out of food and water, due to their water being shut off and food not being available. About 2 million families lost their homes and became homeless, while 1 million farms were taken away from their owners. The ones who decided to stay and live in their homes and farms had to borrow water, food, clothing, and more from neighbors and strangers. A lot of families depended on one another to help through out this rough patch in history. People would line up in bread lines to collect bread for their families to eat. Some women would even bake their own bread and feed as many people as they could. If you wanted to survive during the Great Depression, you needed to help others, as well as they help you.

At the worst point of the Great Depression there were million people unemployed in the U.S. Unemployment rates for African Americans and Latinos were higher than most americans. Without jobs there was no money coming into the households and for this reason many people could not pay their mortgage, some were enticed from their homes and lived on the street, in their cars, or in hoovervilles. Inside the home family life was bleak, many people put off getting married, raising large families, or having families at all. Thousands of people held off going to college and almost all women were ashamed to reveal their hardship. The physical and emotional health of the people was shattered, adults stopped going to the dentist and doctors because they couldn’t afford it. Poor diets and lack of milk consumption led to malnutrition, diet related diseases and other serious health problems. Some people even lost the will to survive, the suicide rate rose 50%. The stigma of poverty never left some people and habits of saving everything developed. Racial violence increased by unemployed whites looking for the same jobs, huge numbers of people with Mexican descent were deported. For the farmers it wasn’t any better, most could manage to still feed their families, but crop prices kept falling and farmers kept losing their land. They couldn’t pay their debts and in turn 400,000 farms were foreclosed between

Investment banks use some of the money to invest in the stock market. If the stock market crashed, the bank would also crash and people would lose all their money. Furthermore, since brokers demanded investors repay their loans, investors were withdrawing savings from banks as well. This was happening on a mass scale, and banks did not have enough money to continue operating.

I know that during the Great Depression, jobs were very hard to find. If you were lucky enough to get a job, it would most likely be a low paying job with an income that would be incredibly hard to raise a family on. As the economic problems of the Great Depression increased, companies could no longer afford to pay employees their previous wages. This led to thousands of Americans being laid off from work at all.

Kids mostly went to school and had no lunch it was a sad time for the world. People that were employed had a low wage, most of the time there wage was good for them before the depression. After the depression everyone had less money less food less stuff in general. There Christmases consisted of buying one cheap thing or

The Great Depression hit the whole world pretty hard, nobody really expected it, most people say it was because of the stock market crash. There were many people who were unemployed during these times and everything was tough for most people. There were people who lived in “Hoovervilles” which were basically tents, unemployed men who were waiting outside for free food, and people waiting outside to get as much money out of the bank as possible.

Wall Street is an extremely useful tool for the American economy. It helps those who are in the lower part of the social ladder by giving them a chance to climb the ladder of economic opportunity. Wall Street also helps boost other industries within America, thereby making it vital for the American economy. As Wall Street is one of the most important financial institutions in the world and provides more positive aspects for the economy than negative ones.

Since American economy is so interconnect to the rest of the world, it became global situation. He would further argue that the only reason that official go against the capitalist is to maintain a strong society and to have a strong society there need to be public support. So the American government intervention in the global economy crisis and takes control of the business to try to bring society back to a normal period. But that even when the depression has passed that wall street will still not be a fault with their action “This argument suggest that while some concession will be made to the working class, the threat of the decline in business confidence will block major efforts to rationalize capitalism” ( Block , 65). This is what blocked would use to explain to why after all of this happen Wall Street was never held accountable for their action. Block would have seen that capitalist where acting in their own self interest and for the capitalist interest overlapped with the government interest there was no regulation, which leads to the crisis because of the struggle the working class endure during this