It would be impossible to begin this discussion of post-2008 financial crash cinematic depictions of Wall Street without going back to the 1980s and to an icon of that time, the now legendary character and “pop culture's most famous banker” (Bradshaw 2010), Gordon Gekko – the CEO of financial investment corporation Gekko & Co. Looking at Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street (set in 1985, and written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone himself) is also, of course, necessary for an analysis of the sequel created by Stone in direct response to the 2007/8 financial crisis (Stone [in:] Digital Spy 2010), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, written by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff. The latter is set in 2008 and was released in 2010. But Gekko immediately became a point of reference for any future film about Wall Street – in fact, for the actual post-1980s Wall Street itself, as well as part of any discussion about what happened during the 2007/8 financial crisis and why. This is because Gekko embodies the new Wall Street “culture” which emerged from the political-economic changes which took place in the 1980s and which gradually contributed to the crisis that occurred almost thirty years later.

As we learn from Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job (2010):

Crucially, according to Samuel Hayes, Professor Emeritus of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, who is interviewed in the film: “In the traditional investment banking partnership model, the partners put the money up, and obviously the partners watched that money very carefully.” However, as Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff write, “since the early 1970s, financial and international capital account liberalization – reduction and removal of barriers to investment inside and outside a country – have taken root worldwide. So, too, have banking crises” (2011: 206).