It seems fitting that the very same week that Citibank and Merrill Lynch go begging hat in hand to foreign investors to bail them out of the sub-prime debacle, the Chicago Merc is recognized as the dominant exchange in the world.
I believe there are only two great films about business; Robert Wise's Executive Suite and Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Fittingly, the commentary track on the DVD of "Executive Suite" features the narration of Oliver Stone. Stone points out that in 1954, when the film was made, American manufacturing was morphing from a culture dominated by engineers to one run by accountants. This is the central theme of Executive Suite. William Holden represents the innovative engineer, working with a skilled team to research and develop manufacturing processes that improve the company's products. Fredric March represents the accounting, profits at all cost, mentality that began to take hold in the 1950s and found its logical conclusion in Enron.
This same struggle was reflected in Wall Street between the characters of Charlie Sheen, the money guy, and Martin Sheen, the working class airline mechanic. Stone foretold the future with the character of Gordon Gekko, the next step in the evolution of the Charlie Sheen and Fredric March characters.
The Gekkoian drive for financial engineering, as opposed to the engineering of real products, finally resulted in Wall Street firms manufacturing and selling products backed by subprime loans. The products are so complex that not even their issuers understand them, nor can they set a market value to them. Well, in the real world, when you don't have any buyers for what you are trying to sell, the value of what you have is zero. This is why Wall Street keeps upping into the tens of billions their guesses on how much capital they have destroyed.
Fifty years ago, the William Holden character won out in Executive Suite. If his character ran Wall Street, he would raise capital for worthy companies that actually make things, real things to better the lives of others. Unfortunately, Fredric March and the accounting engineers have been running Wall Street for the last 20 years, and they have run it right into the ground.