A week ago, one of my professors gave us a weird assignment. He wanted us to watch a movie, The Wallstreet, so we can talk about it in the next course. In the first few minutes of watching it, I thought “This is just an old Wolf on The Wallstreet”. But as we got to talk about the movie from another perspective, the movie got a lot more relevant.
So, in this movie from 1987, business is complicated
Charlie Sheen has the main character. Well, he was more handsome back then, so it’s really worth the watch. But we’ll talk about that in another article. So, as a little spoiler, he is a small stockbroker who wants to become rich. He is smart, full of life, and can get everything he wants. So he does and becomes the help of a very rich and influential man. He gets the money he wanted, the most beautiful woman. But eventually, he is scammed. Therefore, a very common narrative. So let’s see what we tried to learn from this. First of all, to make such a business (with stock exchanges) you have to have some inside information. The rich guy made Charlie Sheen follow another rich guy and study every move that he made. Which, by the way, was illegal. So he did and caught the big fish.
Rompetrol: is this a business like in the movies?
After they saw the movie, the Romanians thought “Oh, I can do that too!”. So, in 2004, the transactions from The BVB were blocked. The Rise project is more detailed in this situation.
So basically, Rompetrol was not officially listed on the stock exchange market of Bucharest, and the sale price was chosen by someone who definitely didn’t have the competent skills to do that. But the small investors didn’t know that, only our Charlie Sheen, who had someone in Cyprus who bought stocks illegally.
Also, as we see in the movies, these guys are spreading their money in different accounts, under different names, so it’s harder to track them down. This is how the money from their transaction got to Switzerland, and this was not a really smart move. Seriously, he could’ve chosen at least 3 countries to deposit his money.
The conclusion is that yes, almost everything that we see in this kind of movie is inspired by real-life. Just like in horror movies.
