A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Movie 'Greed Is Good'

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Harindu Chandraratne Rhetorical analysis Wall Street(1987) "Greed Is Good" This 1980s movie called "Wall Street" is about a young and impatient stockbroker who is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider. A corporate raider is a person who buys up underperforming companies, breaks them up and sells their parts at a healthy profit. Gordon Gekko is a corporate raider and also the single largest shareholder in Teldar Paper made a speech about how the members of the management board steal money from the company during an annual stockholders meeting. Gekko gives a speech at a shareholders’ meeting of Teldar Paper, a company he is planning to take over. This is the famous “greed is good” speech as Gekko defends his planned takeover, pointing to the wasteful ways of post-War corporate America, using Teldar’s management as Exhibit A, and claiming himself the company’s saviour a “liberator” of value. He started his speech by saying "Well, I appreciate the …show more content…

What Gekko is referring to is one of the worst stock market crashes in history known as “Black Monday”. This stock market crash began from Hong Kong and spread west to Europe, hitting America after other stock markets have already been shredded. In Australia and New Zealand, the 1987 crash is also known as "Black Tuesday" because of the time zone difference. What made this nightmare happened? Well, the most popular explanation is selling by program traders, most notably as a reaction to the computerized selling required by portfolio insurance hedges. After Black Monday, regulators overhauled trade-clearing protocols to bring uniformity to all prominent market products. They also developed new rules, known as "trading curbs" or colloquially as circuit

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