Wall Street (the Movie) Analysis

Wall Street (The Movie)

Wall Street had many great examples of both business ethics and accounting topics. It showed how corrupt business tactics can be and how it could affect the whole company as well as people in the community. Gordon Gekko the CEO of a huge company was trying to buy a suffering airline called Blue Star, to run it into the ground and turn it into a profit. Bud Fox who was the son of a long time employee at Blue Star, started as a small time stockbroker but ended up becoming Gekko’s right hand man. The ethical battle started here for Bud when it came to the decision whether to run Blue Star down with Gekko and leave his father unemployed, or do the “right thing” and stop Gekko.

The first of the topics that were mentioned throughout the movie was the share, which represents ownership in a corporation or an entity alike. Anybody can own shares but there may be different classes for actual employees. Another accounting topic in the movie was the stockholders, which are individuals who own shares or stock in a company. What Gekko was trying to do was play the market and buy Blue Star stock for next to nothing. The third topic is dividends, which are a distribution of a portion of a company's earnings paid out to shareholders. Dividend can be paid quarterly, biannually and annually depending on the company policy. Liquidation, which is the conversion of assets into cash, had a very strong lead in the movie. Gekko was trying to liquidate Blue Star to make a profit for himself. The last topic is profitability, which is the ability to generate net income on a consistent basis. This was Gekko’s goal because it meant more wealth for him.

Bud Fox is faced with many ethical dilemmas throughout the movie. It all started when Gekko asked him to obtain information about a company’s stock so he can never lose money. After Bud started to sneak around and start to illegally obtain information Bud had a much more difficult decision to make. The point came...