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Have you taken a look at your 401(k) recently? Did you find that you were plundered by the pin-striped pirates of the stock market?
Well, a bottle of wine would make you feel better, especially if you open it with this Screwed by Wall Street Corkscrew ($9.95) from the NeatoShop.
Link | More fun Barware & Cocktail supplies
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This post is not about the Wall Street protesters, well, yes it is, but not about the Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011. A century ago, people were not any happier about what went on in New York City’s financial district.
On September 16, 1920, an explosion at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in downtown Manhattan killed 39 people and wounded hundreds more. It would be the deadliest terror attack on American soil until the Oklahoma City bombing 75 years later. Despite its proximity to the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, the Wall Street bombing of 1920 has more in common with the public sentiment at the Occupy Wall Street protests in lower Manhattan today—with one notable exception. Today’s protesters are committed to nonviolence. The anarchists of yesteryear were not. They largely failed in their attacks on capitalism and Wall Street—and their tactics turned public sentiment against their cause.
That bombing was the culmination of decades of violence on Wall Street, which involved suicide bombs, union-busting mercenaries, and gunfire. After the 1920 bombing, cooler heads prevailed, and everything was hunky-dory on Wall Street …for about nine years. Link
The following is an article taken from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History.
She walked up and down Wall Street in rags -but in her day she was the richest woman in America. Meet Hetty Green, financial genius and obsessive skinflint.
The employees at Manhattan’s Chemical and National Bank were too intimidated to laugh at the strange woman who visited their vaults on a daily basis, even though she had a laundry list of eccentricities as long as your arm. She wore clothes so worn out they were falling apart on her body, she never washed her underwear because it was “too expensive,” and she spent almost every day locked in the bank’s vaults eating raw onions and counting her riches. Had Hetty Green been a different kind of woman, those who saw her marching down Wall Street might have snickered. But Hetty’s reputation was every bit as formidable as her scowling, forbidding face.
BORN CHEAP
Stinginess came naturally to Hetty’s family. Born in 1835 to a family of wealthy blue bloods, including a father who wanted his daughter to manage her fortune well, Hetty could read the daily financial papers to her dad at age six and opened her own savings account at age eight. By 21, she was so miserly she didn’t even want to light the birthday candles on her own cake because it would waste them. Eventually, the party guests convinced her to light them, but she blew them out immediately so she could return them to the grocery store for a refund.
SHE’S A RICH GIRL
This was the same birthday at which Hetty came into a multimillion-dollar trust. Almost a decade later, her father died and left her his vast estate. Hetty cleverly invested her money, increasing its value enormously. But she still wore secondhand clothes, took her meals in workingmen’s dives, saw doctors at free charity clinics, and lived in cheap boardinghouses to avoid paying property taxes.
ON THE DOTTED LINE
She was suspicious of the many suitors who courted her, believing they were all after her money. But at age 33, she agreed to marry businessman Edward Henry Green -after he agreed to sign a prenuptial agreement renouncing all rights to her money. Two children and a lot of angst later, Edward Green divorced her. When he died in 1902, Hetty Green moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, with her children and commuted daily to her bank in New York City.
POOR LITTLE RICH KIDS
Vowing to make her son Ned the richest man in the world, Hetty saved every cent she could. She gave up washing her clothes, never changed or washed her sheets, tried to evade paying bills, and went to bed at sundown to avoid burning candles. She never turned on the heat or used hot water.
But she refused to spend any money on her kids, either. When Ned broke his leg, she wouldn’t take him to a doctor, saying it was too pricey. His gangrenous leg later had to be amputated. She forced her daughter Sylvia to wear old clothes, too, and she wouldn’t let her date the “fortune hunters” Hetty believed were everywhere. When she finally let Sylvia marry, she forced the new husband to give up all rights to his wife’s fortune.
SHE’S A RICHER GIRL
Through it all, Hetty made one shrewd financial decision after another. She made terrific investments, owned thousands of plots of land, and had enough cash to make loans to major businesses -even New York City itself- extracting heavy interest on each loan.
But Hetty’s penny-pinching ways continued. She spent hours each day counting her money. Her habit of walking down to her bank each day in a ragged, black dress with a scowl on her face earned her the nickname “the Witch of Wall Street.”
THE DECLINE OF HETTY
Eventually, Hetty’s health failed. She suffered from a painful hernia but refused to have an operation because it cost $150 (123 euros). She became even more paranoid and suspicious, believing kidnappers and murderers were after her and her fortune.
Eventually, her bad temper was the end of her. She reportedly died of apoplexy, in 1916, after an argument with a servant (not one of her own, of course).
GIVING AWAY THE GREEN STUFF
Hetty Green left $100 million to her children, who, ironically, became some of the most generous philanthropists of their time, donating money to numerous museums, libraries, and civic institutions. Hetty Green would have been horrified to hear it.
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The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
It’s been 23 years since Michael Douglas proclaimed that “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Gordon Gekko was back last week with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, so we thought it would be a good time to revisit the original and see if the sequel stacks up.
It’s been ranked #57 on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes” list (it comes in right after “A boy’s best friend is his mother” from Psycho) and no doubt became the mantra for many a broker back in the excess of the ‘80s. But the quote wasn’t really even a Gordon Gekko original. “I wrote the line based on reading a speech by Ivan Boesky. He said, ‘Greed is right,’ and it stuck with me,” Oliver Stone said. The actual line from Boesky’s speech at Berkeley in 1986 was “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Boesky was involved in major insider trading scandals in the mid-‘80s.
The real line from the movie, by the way, is “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” but it typically gets shortened when people quote it.
The movie didn’t really do that great when it opened. It was fine, opening at $4.1 million the first weekend, but Throw Momma From the Train was more popular that weekend, raking in $7.3 million. Wall Street was really more of a slow burn – it went on to gross $43.8 million and saw a surge in popularity a couple of years after its release.
The sequel isn’t doing bad, but it’s unlikely to see the success the original did. Money Never Sleeps opened at $19 million, but it also opened on three times more screens than the original did.
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Michael Douglas in such an iconic role now, but when actors were being considered, the studio was rallying hard for Warren Beatty. Beatty passed, so Oliver Stone requested Richard Gere. Gere wasn’t interested in playing a selfish stockbroker either. He was warned that Michael Douglas was more of a producer than an actor but decided to take a chance on him as Gordon Gekko anyway.
Daryl Hannah disliked her role as Bud Fox’s social-climbing girlfriend, Darien Taylor. Stone thought the materialistic character conflicted too much with Hannah’s idealistic views and says now he should have recast her in favor of Sean Young instead of trying to make it work. Her lack of commitment to the performance showed – although Michael Douglas won a Best Actor Oscar for his role, Hannah had to be content with a Worst Supporting Actress Razzie. Hannah has said that she and Stone had a terrible working relationship and has reportedly never seen the film.
Charlie Sheen got to pick the actor who played his morally-sound father in the film. He nixed Jack Lemmon in favor of his real-life dad, of course. The father-son duo parodied themselves a few years later in Hot Shots: Part Deux, when they pass each other on a boat and simultaneously yell out, “I loved you in Wall Street!”
The sequel takes its name from a line from the original movie: in one scene, Gordon Gekko calls Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) early in the morning. When Bud sleepily answers the phone, Gekko says, “Money never sleeps.”
Shia LaBeouf really got into preparing for his role. He did intense research into trading, including investing and trading money with different firms – reportedly up to $1,000,000. And when chatting with stockbrokers and traders, he discovered that a large percentage of them got into the business after seeing the original Wall Street. In exchange for their help with research, LaBeouf would promise to introduce them to Michael Douglas, who may be harboring a little contempt for people who apparently missed the point of the movie: he has said he would be OK if he never had “one more drunken Wall Street broker come up to me and say, ‘You’re the man!’”
The original movie brought suspenders back to the forefront of fashion. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who designed for the new movie as well, remembers getting a call from the fashion editor at the Los Angeles Times, who told her Los Angeleans were slicking their hair back and wearing suspenders. “Gordon was a villain — who knew people would want to dress like the villain?”
Oliver Stone had some personal inspiration to make the movie – his dad, Lou Stone, was a broker at a Hayden Stone (which was no relation – his dad wasn’t a partner) at the height of the Great Depression. His dad later complained that businessmen were always mocked or parodied in films, so after his father’s death in 1985, Stone decided to make a movie he would have liked (though he had been mulling the idea for the film around since at least 1981). In fact, he named Hal Holbrook’s character in honor of his dad.
So… Gordon Gekko: savvy businessman or selfish villain? What’s your take?
After the one of the largest economic meltdowns of the century, thousands of people from America’s largest financial institutions were laid off. Where did they go?
DJ Patil of LinkedIn, the business-oriented social media website, has an inside look based on updates to LinkedIn member’s company titles:
Where did all these employees go? One hypothesis is that many of the employees left the financial industry. According to the LinkedIn data set, that just isn’t true. There are a handful of people that did transition to other industries and start new careers, but most stayed in the financial space. To be specific, other than two acquiring companies (Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch and Nomura acquired Lehman Brothers’ franchise in the Asia Pacific region), Barclays was by far the biggest beneficiary, scooping up 10% of the laid off talent, followed by Credit Suisse at 1.5% and Citigroup at 1.1 %.
The name of the company changes, but I suspect the game is still on: Link – via TYWKIWDBI
Today, Darth Vader rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. He was accompanied by stormtroopers as R2-D2 worked the floor.
via io9
Sportswriter Wright Thompson tried out the “Legends” section at the new Yankee Stadium. The seats originally went for $2,500. Now they are mostly empty, even though the price has dropped to $1,250. In telling the story of how such an exclusive luxury section came to be, Thompson relates the changes in baseball with the state of the economy.
A recent poll discovered an unsettling trend emerging for the first time. American families whose household income is $75,000 or less now have zero dollars of discretionary income. According to Luker, that means about 75 percent of the country can never responsibly afford to go to a live professional sporting event. Franchises want them to be fans, to buy the gear and pull for their teams and watch the telecasts the leagues are paid billions for. But they don’t need them to come to their stadiums. There are, right now, plenty of rich people who love games. The prices reflect that. The reason sporting events cost so much now, Luker’s research shows, is because they are designed to be affordable only to those making $150,000 or more a year.
This wasn’t always true. Ten years ago, it was cheaper to go to a baseball game than to a movie in half of the big league markets (take away parking at the game, and it was cheaper in every market). Today, there isn’t a single city in America where it costs less to go to a major league game than to a movie. Everywhere we turn, we see examples of the collapsing middle class. This is where that issue lives in the world of sports, and it has predictable consequences.
You don’t have to be a baseball fan to relate to this story of a business choosing short-term profits over long-term growth. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Julie Jacobson)
Senator Claire McCaskill is angry at the Wall Street "idiots" who are giving out $18 billion in bonuses in 2008. So angry that she has just introduced a bill to cap their pay:
An angry U.S. senator introduced legislation Friday to cap compensation for employees of any company that accepts federal bailout money.
Under the terms of a bill introduced by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, no employee would be allowed to make more than the president of the United States. Obama’s current annual salary is $400,000.
"We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer," an enraged McCaskill said on the floor of the Senate. "They don’t get it. These people are idiots. You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses."
McCaskill’s proposed compensation limit would cover salaries, bonuses and stock options.
Who thinks it’s a darned good idea?
You know the economy is bad when Wall Street banker’s girlfriends are complaining about their lives. Here’s a day-in-the-life of members of Dating a Banker Anonymous:
They shared their sad stories the other night at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say, the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day, as it did on Sept. 29.
In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”
Ravi Somaiya of The New York Times has the story: Link
(Photo: Rob Bennett / NY Times)
