So finally Gekko is back. Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. It doesn’t disappoint. It pushes all the right buttons and manages to communicate the current situation with reasonable clarity. I will be interested to see how the person in the street views it.

I enjoyed the quick hello from Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox and Oliver Stone made a few cameos himself. The plot was fairly straightforward but the message of the film was stark: the system is untenable and has been seriously abused. Sure Gekko used to buy companies and strip them down and sell them on: the ultimate art of financial efficiency and productivity improvement. But now it’s about financial engineering which has nothing to do with the business itself.

As Gekko notes in a speech to a group of students and alumni, the share of GDP generated by financial services got as high as 40%………it used to be around 7%.

This orgy of financial speculation has left our global economies in tatters and we rush to pick up the pieces. Blame lies all around so that shouldn’t be our focus (they lent it, you spent it!) but the ramifications are very serious. We know well that the global financial system nearly collapsed and after trillions of dollars in bail outs and stimulus, it still looks very shaky. Payback will be painful.

The new “Bud Fox” character, carrying the torch for alternative energy, asks the “bad guy” what his number is, how much it would take for him to walk away from the business. His answer: “more”. It’s become nothing more than ego, a game as Gekko would describe it. Ultimately it’s a loss of understanding and values. The disconnect between the financial markets and the real world has grown so wide that a chasm has been created, a big black monetary hole which is dragging us all in. This film has much more impact than Mike Moore’s recent treatise on capitalism because it paints a truer picture: the excess, the egos, the glamour….and the frailties of us all.

Susan Sarandon has a neat role as a nurse turned real estate speculator. She painfully encapsulates the shift from real, productive work to speculation on house prices. Needless to say she comes a cropper.

The bail outs continue and moral hazard is everywhere. Is Gekko redeemed? Not really. He’s more human but the guy still loves the game and is happy to play even under the new rules. The trillion dollar question for the audience is simple: will the rules be changed?

Don’t hold your breath.

Tags: banking, credit, debt, financial crisis, gekko, leverage, money, oliver stone, speculation, wall street 2