"Greed Good? Not even Gordon Gekko would say so now."

That's the ending line from a piece entitled, Gekko: How Reality Trumped My Sequel, by Stephen Schiff, the first writer of Wall Street, that 1987 movie by Oliver Stone. Remember that movie? Well, Schiff recently turned in to the Studios, just this past July, his sequel to that 1987 movie, which he entitled Money Never Sleeps.

But Schiff is not patting himself on the back. In fact, here's what he says: "But I’m on to the next. Still, I keep thinking of the many months I spent researching, and how little that research predicted the scorched earth we now find ourselves circumnavigating."

Here's what else Schiff says: no one on Wall Street seemed to see this coming, either:

"So I asked everyone I talked to what their imagination of disaster would be. What were they afraid of? What would cause the Big Meltdown? The funny thing is, not one of them mentioned the crash in housing prices. Not one mentioned subprime mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. No one imagined Bear Stearns going under, or Lehman Brothers, or AIG. No one foresaw banks Like WaMu and Wachovia crumbling.

The most common answer I got was a terrorist attack. The suitcase nuke in Central Park. An Al Qaeda assault in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Something big and bad in The City of London. But terrorism seemed like another movie to me. When I steered my interlocutors back toward finance, it soon became clear what the number one fear was: China. China devouring the world. China breaking a nail and the ripples building into a tsunami elsewhere."

Wow. And apparently, the real Gordon Gekkos of Wall Street these days are not very, well, "Gekko-esque":

"They tend not to be suspenders-wearing swashbucklers so much as computer geeks, staring into four screens at once and crunching numbers to the beat of abstruse algorithms that may mystify even the guy one desk over. They work very, very hard, and most of the action in their world takes place between about 6:30 and 10 am, when they’re moving at a blinding pace. Doing what, exactly? Barking into telephones? Hurtling down hallways in sharp suits shouting commands? No. They now do everything by IM, and when they talk telephonically it’s usually through a speaker stalk sticking out of a device called a “turret,” which speed-dials everyone in their universe instantly. And they never wear suits to the office. At their tensest, most dramatic moments, what they’re doing, mostly, is…typing."

It's a good read, and you can find it here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-24/gekko-how-reality-trumped-my-sequel/2/

And remember this, what Schiff himself says at the end of his piece: "What killed us was good old greed. Our own." Not the Gordon Gekkos of Wall Street, or any other boogey-men in the night...