Ironias

A vida com uma simplicidade trágica consegue por vezes e num futuro replicar na vida real aquilo a que grandes actores dão vida em filmes e situações imaginárias.
Neste filme Michael Douglas volta a interpretar o papel de Gordon Gekko um especulador que não olhando a meios acaba na prisão e que aqui recomeça a vida depois de oito anos de pena.
Nesta sequela, aliás bastante inferior ao anterior filme, ele por mais de uma vez classifica de cancro a doença mortal do sistema financeiro e defende-se perante a filha que não lhe perdoa a morte do irmão por overdose.

Na vida real lutando desesperadamente contra um cancro na laringe e tendo o filho preso por tráfico de cocaína não se pode dizer que a vida real tenha sido tão cor-de-rosa como foi a sua fabulosa carreira na grande tela.
Há no entanto um momento capital no filme em que ele vai a uma universidade publicitar o seu livro. O discurso que aqui se transcreve é a análise exemplar daquilo que hoje vivemos.

Vale a pena ler.

 
You're all pretty much fucked.

You don't know it yet, but you're the NINJA generation. No income. No job. No assets.
You got a lot to look forward to. Blood, buddy. He's gonna be your blood.
Someone reminded me the other evening that I once said, "Greed is good." Now it seems it's legal.
But, folks, it's greed that makes my bartender buy three houses he can't afford with no money down.

And it's greed that makes your parents refinance their $200, 000 house for 250.
And then they take that extra 50 and they go down to the mall. And they buy a plasma TV, cell phones, computers, an SUV.
And hey, why not a second home while we're at it?
Because, gee whiz, we all know that prices of houses in America always go up, right?
It's greed that makes the government in this country cut the interest rates to one-percent, after 9/11.

So we could all go shopping again. They got all these fancy names for trillions of dollars of credit. CMOs, CDOs, SIVs, ABSs.
I honestly think there's may be only 75 people in the world who know what they are.
But I'll tell you what they are. They're WMDs. Weapons of Mass Destruction.
That's what they are. When I was away, it seemed like greed got greedier with a little bit of envy mixed in.
Hedge funders were walking home with 50, 100 million bucks a year.

So Mr. Banker, he's looks around, and he says, "My life looks pretty boring."
So he starts leveraging his interests up to 40, 50 to one with your money. Not his, yours.
Because he could. You're supposed to be borrowing, not them.
And the beauty of the deal, no one is responsible. Because everybody's drinking the same Kool-Aid.

Last year, ladies and gentlemen, forty percent of all American corporate profits came from financial services. Not production, not anything remotely to do with the needs of the American public.
The truth is, we 're all part of it now. Banks, consumers, we're moving money around in circles.
We take a buck, we shoot it full of steroids, and we call it "leverage." I call it "steroid banking."

I've been considered a pretty smart guy when it comes to finance. That was fantastic, man.
And maybe I was in prison too long. But sometimes it's the only place to stay sane  and look out through those bars and say,
"Hey! Is everybody out there nuts?"

It's clear as a bell to those that pay attention. The mother of all evil is speculation. Leveraged debt. Bottom line. It's borrowing to the hilt. And I hate to tell you this, but it's a bankrupt business model. It won 't work.
It's systemic, malignant, and it's global. Like cancer. It's a disease, and we got to fight back.