Week 6 - Greed Is Good

Wall Street is a messy place. It is loud and crazy. Yet, the most interesting thing of Wall Street and “big business” is all the people that take and take without earning it. Getting a one million dollar bonus is outrageous. I suppose if you make five billion it is absolutely nothing, but when the person who developed the R.E.E.T. earns a two billion dollar bonus in 2007, you wonder how that money was accumulated in the first place.

It scares me to think that people will buy a business and rip it to shreds like in the movie “Wall Street”. There can be so much more to come from fixing up a place and then giving jobs to more people while still earning millions of dollars. People are lazy these days. They want a quick fix and move on to the next thing. It truly sickens me. A great analogy would be that banks and other individual companies are like guys in an office betting on a football game, who are other companies and peoples jobs. Those guys take their bets and throw in the dice. At the end, someone wins and someone loses. It’s just more often that everyone below the position of a CEO or President seems to lose. Funny how that works out?

"The anger at Wall Street only grew at the news that Merrill Lynch, after reporting $15 billion of losses, had rushed to pay $4 billion in bonuses on the eve of its merger with Bank of America." To me that’s such a waste. People are hiding money to pay other people and themselves while companies, families, individuals, cities, and the entire country falls apart. What a disappointment in American culture, and even more in Americans who actually say they are Americans. What a disgrace.