We are six weeks from the release of the film Wall St. Money Never Sleeps, yet Gordon Gekko has been alive and well over the last 22 years. Anthony Scaramucci has written a great book about the personality complex of greed and envy in Goodbye Gordon Gekko, based upon his life experiences, from his salad days at Goldman Sachs to his current role of CEO and Founder of SkyBridge Capital.
I always thought that Gekko (and Bud Fox for that matter) was a weak man. He made bad choices, mostly because he had no sense of who he was. He had no confidence in himself outside his dealmaking. If you took away the deal, what did he have spiritually? [FYI - I am also someone who threw Liar's Poker out of a 12-story window the window, not because of the writing, but because I thought the protagonists were a**holes and they were not the least bit interesting as people. There is no room for machismo nor bravado on a trading floor, nor on Wall St.]
Scaramucci is an example of the flip side of Gekko. With great candor, he dissects his own life and the choices he had to make in the balance between being a Capitalist and a moral human being.
Scaramucci on Capitalism:
“This is a fantastic country. We have great core values and we are benevolent country. We believe in free will and the capitalist spirit. If you read Karl Marx, greed will consume itself, ultimately because of the design of capitalism. I think we are smarter than that and I think with the right social programs and the right core values, we can overcome that.”
On Financial Reform:
“We are wired for risk. We are built on speculation. I bet your relatives came to the US poor. Why else would they have left? We need to dial down the envy and the greed – the animal spirits – which ultimately hurt us. Gekko was a great striver…a great believer in class mobility. But the the ability to hurt others like Bud Fox…people do not like it. Some can watch Gekko on screen and they can walk out of the theater enamored and others are repulsed.”
Here is a particularly interesting exchange in the podcast:
Michael Martin: Why doesn’t the US have its own Sovereign Wealth Fund?
Anthony Scaramucci: That’s a good question. This is not a Democratic or Republican response. There has been a crisis in our political leadership. These funds are set up for the beneficiaries of the future generations of our America. The political class in our country has made a decision to absorb treasure from future generations and reward current voters. We are in a society where we are over-consuming and under-producing.
“I challenge the political class to think about what they are doing and how they will be reflected upon 200 years from now. This is an indictment of both parties about where we are as a nation. There has been 9 or 10 generations since the signing of the Declaration of Independence that have passed a higher living standard to the next generation. We are dropping the baton. It’s not clear to me that there will be the class mobility. It’s not clear to me that we will be leaving a higher living standard for the next generation. It’s being driven by the political leadership and it has to be stopped. ”
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Its all the politicians fault. Goldman Sachs had nothing to do with getting bailouts for its friends. And all the ex-Goldman Sachs folks in the Treasury had nothing to do with the whole world wide fiasco and government attempts to mitigate it(really make it worse). And their advice had it been used would have lead the USA (At least the Goldman Sachs part of it anyway) to prosperity.
Actually, all that sounds like a good reason for there to be no politicians. No politicians, no way for unethical slime with political connections to lobby for a bailout.
You’re new here aren’t you Michael?!
Scaramucci sounds like a Keynesian. “Animal spirits” and “social programs” – no.
http://blog.mises.org/author/michael_martin/
Capitalism isn’t about social programs, nor core values. The main issue with our country is that mercantilist special interests are used to create law.Quit using force to take away money from the productive class and redistributing it to those the “state” wishes to give it to.When you recognize sovereign personal property as sacrosanct then all involuntary confiscations go away. That is core values. That is morality. Any coercion, any use of force, any involuntary takings of property is theft. It doesn’t matter who does it, nor in what fashion. You can’t have core values in our country when theft is a duality depending on who is legally able to steal. Given this duality, anyone with intelligence will strive to become part of the legal band of thieves. This is the root of core value.When all theft is illegal regardless of who is doing it, society becomes more socially responsible. Until then, morality is convoluted and social programs undermine the notions and foundations of charity.
Scaramucci is a Keynesian. Here are a few other “wise gems” from the Great Scaramucci from recent CNBC appearances: http://notableandquotable.blogspot.com/search?q=scaramucciShame on you, Martin, and shame on the LvMI. Hailing the writings of people who are deep into licking the boots of the political class should be below this organization and its people.
“Scaramucci is a Keynesian, lamestream sell-out hack.
Here are a few other “wise gems” from the Great Scaramucci from recent CNBC appearances: http://notableandquotable.blogspot.com/search?q=scaramucci
Shame on you, Martin, and shame on the LvMI. Hailing the writings of people who are deep into licking the boots of the political class should be below this organization and its people.”
This is what happens when people start routinely reading LRC.
What happens? They become intolerant of pieces on an otherwise great site praising economic crackpotery…? Tragic.
From Martin’s full length puff-piece on HuffPo:”With his free time, Scaramucci and SkyBrige host the annual SALT Conference in Las Vegas, which this year featured Bill Clinton as the main Key Note speaker. “President Obama was saying now is not the time to be going to Vegas. So what did we do? We went against the grain and did what we thought was best. We went to Vegas and we had over 500 people there.”"You won’t find me at a Mises Circle where the keynote speaker is Bill Clinton. Scaramucci is a fraud. He’s going to run his firm into the ground with his patented brand of cluelessness (“Gold is the twisted mistress of investment” yikes, I guess you have to go to Harvard to be smart enough to come up with something like that). This is probably why he decided to write a book– fleece the suckers one more time before he bails out with OPM in a bulging suitcase.Seriously, this is embarrassing that you’d write something like this, Martin, and that you’d have the nerve to publish it here at LvMI like Scaramucci is some hero of free market economics. This post brought the blog down a few notches.Oh no! I am being a dogmatic LRC reader! Watch out everyone! Watch out for the crazy guy who is obsessed with intellectual purity! He’s going to ruin our “Big Tent Liberty” social mixer, hosted by the Cato Institute. Quick, someone check the punchbowl for tampering.
“intellectual purity!”
I would say crackpots who spout angry rhetoric and overdo it with the exclamation marks, but that’s just me.
“He’s going to ruin our “Big Tent Liberty” social mixer, hosted by the Cato Institute.”
Yeah, I’m double agent for the Kochtopussy sent to sabotage the efforts of the one true path. And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for that Lew Rockwell and his “well” researched conspiratorial diatribes!
Silly troll, is there not a bridge for you to lurk under? Or is the chip on your shoulder so large by now that you can no longer fit under one? Begone.
As for this post… what. the. hell.
…and this comes from someone who can’t discern the difference between angry rhetoric and facetiousness.
This entire boom in wall street over the past 30 years (and the hyper-boom over the past 10) would be completely impossible if we used sound money. Wall St is one large competition to see who can capture as many inflationary dollars as quickly as possible…and that’s it. While I respect the people who do actually win this game (since they’re competing with the world’s smartest people for the biggest stakes), it saddens me to see how few of them actually understand that no one makes a billion dollars in a year without a giant inflation engine operating at full tilt somewhere.
Well stated. I’d only question whether they “don’t understand… the giant inflation engine…”
Perhaps many of them do understand it quite well. But maybe they don’t care. I wonder how many billionaires really would.
lolololol
The title of this article takes on a whole new meaning, given Micheal Douglas’s recent cancer diagnosis.
Nice one LvMI!
Gary North is a crank.
“Gary North is a crank.”
This should be stated more often.
Let me translate that into English – “I think that if we give guns and unlimited power to the right people then we can assist poor people by confiscating money from the middle class using violence.”
How is this any different from the countries that have sovereign wealth funds? None of them have non-humans installed as political leaders, so I assume that power has corrupted their leaders as thoroughly as it has in the USA. Do you know how these funds acquired their money? (by force) Do you know who controls their funds? (politicians, cronies and family members) Do you know who benefits? (ditto) How many of the countries with SWFs which you claim are “concerned about future generations” can actually balance their budgets, right now? (almost none of them) Does running up $1T of sovereign debt but with $100B tucked away with your cronies in a Sovereign Slush Fund really indicate that you care for *anything* except your own sweet a$$ ? (Goobye Mr. Chips)
Why Doesn’t the United States Have a Sovereign Wealth Fund?
Two points: First, the Government in fact owns a sovereign wealth fund. It is the forced-savings program called Social Security. The Government chooses to invest that money in Treasury bonds. In theory, it could invest in other asset classes. Moreover, the Government controls scores of government-owned corporations, such as Federal Prison Industries, Inc., Amtrak, the Postal Service, Federal Flood Insurance Company, etc. These corporations own valuable assets, issue and purchase corporate debt, and act as investment vehicles in some circumstances.
Second, a sovereign wealth fund in the hands of the Government would only further impoverish rank-and-file Americans. Just to make a single point about the deleterious consequences: It would further politicize the allocation of available capital. A wealth fund in the hands of the Government is unlikely to invest in media organizations that criticize the Government, or in private schools that compete with the Government. The last thing the people of the United States needs is to see more money in the hands of a privileged, politically connected few.
I’d disagree with your first point. The US government social security program is not a sovereign wealth fund at all. Not to be hyperbolic, but it really is best described as a ponzi scheme. And when there’s any money “invested” at all, its in treasuries and there’s so much debt now, the yield on them will be pushed down much further to the point of uselessness.
I do agree though that the creation of a sovereign wealth fund would be very dangerous. Just the concept of it scares me. What makes markets work is the private allocation of capital. As badly distorted as things are now, having a government fund on the loose in the market would be ruinous.
in australia, the “future fund” is lined up for the milking. it’s apparently too much to hope that stupid taxpayers could actually do better at investing than political appointees.
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