The comedian and satirical news host Jon Stewart had a feud with former hedge fund manager and financial expert Jim Cramer. For people unfamiliar with these characters; Jon Stewart is the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, and Jim Cramer is the host of Mad Money on CNBC. Stewart grilled Cramer for over 15 minutes and posed the question, "What’s the difference between a multimillion dollar media “financial expert” and an ordinary street hustler?" Stewart believes Cramer is more an entertainer as himself and he should not be making stock recommendations to the public at large.
Stewart unleashed a fury of intense and condemning questions upon Cramer. However, unfortunately for Cramer he functioned as a stand-in for the entire CNBC company and our entire corporatized news media. Stewart used multiple video clips of Cramer in 2006 to prove Cramer was well aware of the “shenanigans” that allowed investment returns to roll in at 30 percent per year, and major institutions leveraging at 35-to-1 for most of the 2000s. This leveraging, in effect, is the one thing that caused the fall of Wall Street and the decline of our retirement portfolios' value. Stewart made that point to Cramer and Cramer could not disagree. The crucial question Stewart asks and we will attempt to answer is, do shows like Cramer’s Mad Money and other CNBC reporters have an ethical responsibility to be critical, investigative journalists? We must first understand the actions taken by each party involved in the housing and banking collapse of 2009 in order to fully comprehend the ethical situation that unfolded. One must first understand the actions taken by each party prior to 2009. Bankers backed by investors, started lending mountains of excess cap...
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...oguls of Wall Street. CNBC would be included in this conglomerate as they take from the poor and give to the rich utilizing the excuse that, no one could have known. The American people will continue being the stupid ones if we continue trusting these “experts” to put our national interests before their personal ambition. We need to restructure our economy and government, fast.
Works Cited
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Jordan Belfort is famous for his crooked way of earning his millions as a stockbroker on Wall Street. Even Belfort started at the bottom, on his first day in Wall Street he was told he was “lower than pond scum”(Belfort 1). After writing a book about his happenings on Wall Street, we’ve seen the
As a part of the program the station decided to air a 12 minute monologue called "Filthy Words" by comedian George Carlin. The introduction of Carlin's "routine" consisted of, according to Carlin, "words you couldn't say on the public ...
In Karen Hos’ Liquidated, she aims to study the relationships between corporate America and the worlds greatest financial center. . . Wall Street. She puts all her three years of research in her ethnography and thus the very first page of chapter one, we can already understand Hos’ determination to understand what Wall Street is all about. The first main theme explained is the relations in Wall Street that are based on a culture of domination of staff members, their irresponsibility dealing with corporate America, and constant changes that occur during this process. Another major theme we see in her ethnography is that Wall Street, first used for the communities wellbeing, is now profit oriented.
Ethics policies are implemented in almost all businesses. Companies search for candidates that will be moral in their actions so they can ensure long-term financial success. Throughout history we have seen businesses fall due to unethical behavior. In recent years the business Enron Corporation is best known for the scandal that led to the bankruptcy of a company with more than 60 billion dollars in assets. We will examine the circumstances that led to the downfall of Enron, how the scandal was realized, as well as the outcome of one of the largest bankruptcies in American history; a case that exemplifies unethical professional behavior.
"Remarks made during 'Quiz Show and the Future of Television'." Annenberg Washington Program. http://www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/quiz/remarks.htm (3/11/97).
"Jimmy Carter: Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989." Jimmy Carter: Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Mar. 2014.
Enron was a Houston based energy, commodities and services company. When people hear the name Enron they automatically associate their name with one of the biggest accounting and ethical scandals known to date. The documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” provides an in depth examination of Enron and the Enron scandal. The film does a wonderful job of depicting the downfall of Enron and how the corporate culture and ethics were key to Enron’s fall. As the movie suggests, Enron is “not a story about numbers, it is a story about people.”
Ponzi schemes are a continuing problem in the investment world and can only be stopped if the Securities and Exchange Commission does better safe guarding investors’ money. This paper will address Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and how he was able to steal billions of dollars from investors. The reasons why the SEC responded so slowly to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and what can be done in the future to make sure another Ponzi scheme of this magnitude does not happen again. Also included in this paper will be examples of good and bad leadership theories.
Ethical behavior, in a general sense, is a definition of moral behavior in regards to lawfulness, societal standards, and things of that nature. In the business world, ethics commonly refer to acceptable and unacceptable business practices within the workplace, and all other related environments. The acceptance of colleges regardless of ethnicity, gender, and beliefs, as well as truthfulness and honesty in relation to finances within the company are examples of ideal ethical business conducts. Unethical business behavior would include manipulating procedures based on bias or discrimination, engaging in activities that promote political gain, as well as blatant fabrication of monetary factors within the company and “can affect organizational performance and is costly to employers, employees, shareholders, and other organizational stakeholders” (Cox 263). When a corporation practices proper ethics, it is representing not only itself in a positive manner, but its partners, shareholders, and clients as well. On the other hand, when an organization partakes in unethical activities, all parties are negatively affected. The collapse of Enron is a major case of unethical conduct in the corporate world, because the circumstances surrounding the firm’s chaotic plunge where so scandalous that it left “creditors wrangling over Enron's skeletal remains” (Helyar) long after the company had seen its demise. There are numerous instances to be mentioned, including deliberate failure to properly report fiscal losses, insider trading, and overall relentlessness. The inclusive purpose of this paper is to further explore the underlining factors that contributed to the downfall of the once powerful Enron, and how a new way of approaching business ethi...
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 restitution to any swindled stock buyers of his brokerage firm (A&E Networks Television). Though his lavish spending and berserk party lifestyle was consumed by excessive greed, he displayed both positive and negative aspects of business communications.
Among the big skeptics in The Big Short are two thirty-year-old men who founded a small money management firm and named it Cornwall Capital Management. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai, later joined by Ben Hockett, ventured into running a money making business out of a house garage in Berkeley, California, with just a little over a hundred thousand dollars in their bank account and absolutely no experience in investments. Rather than knowledge and expertise, the young financiers were equipped with the conviction that “the best way to m...
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“When a company called Enron… ascends to the number seven spot on the Fortune 500 and then collapses in weeks into a smoking ruin, its stock worth pennies, its CEO, a confidante of presidents, more or less evaporated, there must be lessons in there somewhere.” - Daniel Henninger.
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