Cultural Symbol
Gekko has become a symbol in popular culture for unrestrained greed (with the signature line, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good"), often in fields outside corporate finance.
On September 25, 2008, Michael Douglas, acting as a UN ambassador for peace, was at the 2008 session of the United Nations General Assembly. Reporters sought to ask him off topic questions about Gordon Gekko; "Douglas was asked whether he bore some responsibility for the behavior of the greed merchants who had brought the world to its knees thanks to his (aka Gekko's) encouragement." Trying to return to topic Douglas tried to "suggest that the same level of passion Wall Street investors showed should also apply to getting rid of nuclear weapons."
The actor was also asked to compare nuclear Armageddon with the "financial Armageddon on Wall Street". After one reporter inquired, "Are you saying, Gordon, that greed is not good?" Douglas stated, "I'm not saying that. And my name is not Gordon. It's a character I played 20 years ago."
On October 8, 2008, the character was referenced in a speech by the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in his speech "The Children of Gordon Gekko" concerning the Financial crisis of 2007-2010. Rudd stated “It is perhaps time now to admit that we did not learn the full lessons of the greed-is-good ideology. And today we are still cleaning up the mess of the 21st-century children of Gordon Gekko.”
On July 28, 2009, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone cited Gekko's greed is good slogan in a speech to the Italian senate, saying that the free market had been replaced by a greed market, and also blamed such a mentality for the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
In May 2011, CCP Games released an internal newsletter entitled "Greed is Good?: The Gordon Gekko Issue", promoting a debate amongst its staff about whether introducing microtransactions to its flagship MMORPG, EVE Online is good or not for the video-game, its community and the company itself. The community's response to said newsletter was overwhelmingly negative, considering that said community has expressed on multiple times that, since the video-game is subscription-based, they feel CCP Games would be "double-charging" its subscribers if they adopted microtransactions.
Read more about this topic: Gordon Gekko
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or symbol:
“Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after the forms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The truth has never been of any real value to any human being—it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)