“What a commentary on the state of twentieth-century capitalism,” mused “motivational speaker” Jordan Belfort as he looked back on his life of fraud, sex, and drugs. As head of the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, he fleeced investors of hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 1990’s. I saw Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street and was sufficiently intrigued to read Belfort’s memoir, on which the screenplay is based. I learned quite a lot.
For example, the scam known as “pump and dump,” which netted Belfort and his fellow Strattonites their ill-gotten gains, comes into much clearer view in the memoir than it does in the film. The technique works by buying up the stock of worthless companies through nominees, selling it on a rising market to genuine investors, and then unloading all of it.
It was not just small investors who were ruined; what stands out is the greed and gullibility of the rich who were sold the same rubbish by the “young and stupid” salesmen Belfort preferred to hire. Belfort was (is) obviously a super-slick snake-oil merchant, brilliant in his trade until drugs ruined his judgment.
Belfort, once again selling the elixir of success after a brief stint in prison, professes to feel shame for his behavior; but I suspect that deep down his contempt for those he swindled outweighs any sense of remorse. In a recent book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, the economist Thomas Piketty describes Stratton Oakmont as an example of “meritocratic extremism” – the culmination of a century-long passage from the old inequality, characterized by inherited wealth and discreet lifestyles, to the new inequality, with its outsize bonuses and conspicuous consumption.
Belfort has been described as a perverse Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to himself and his pals. The rich were the old-money Protestant establishment whose members had lost their skills for protecting their wealth, which was therefore rightfully forfeited to street-savvy up-and-comers – mainly Jewish – amoral enough to help themselves to it. But Stratton Oakmont’s peculations were hardly an exception on Wall Street. As a good friend, who was an SEC regulator for 20 years, told me when I asked about the extent of fraud, “I found it to be pervasive. The system simply makes it too easy, and human nature colludes on both sides. Greed is the source of all cons.”