Down The Tube Poem by gershon hepner

We thought that money never sleeps,
but that turned out to be quite wrong,
and what we thought we had for keeps
did not remain with us for long,
but vanished like fair-weather friends,
unglacially, for it would melt
before our eyes. An ice-age ends,
and hot as hell, our guilty Gelt
now glumly causes warming global,
affecting markets which include
our own, while ignorant, ignoble,
and unshrewd we are beshrewed.
The Stock Exchange, no longer hectic,
and the Federal Reserve,
in desperate, deathly dialectic,
cannot the GDP preserve,
and while the weather’s getting hot,
we’re going down the tube from which
no man returns, to be or not
to be poor options no more rich.

Inspired by Tim Arango’s article on Oliver Stone’s the new movie, “Wall Street 2, ” a sequel to his 1987 movie “Wall Street” (“Greed Is Bad, Gekko. So Is a Meltdown: In Case You Missed the Point the First Time, Oliver Stone Returns to All Street, ” in the NYT, August 8,2009:
“In this financial crisis it was the traditional banks and the investment banks that had a larger role in doing stupid and silly things than the hedge funds, ” said Mr. Roubini, who earned acclaim for being early in predicting the financial crisis. (Mr. Stone offered Mr. Roubini a small role in the film as a hedge fund manager.) Mr. Stone also had conversations with Jim Chanos, a prominent hedge fund manager who urged him to focus less on hedge funds and more on the banking system. “There was a much more important story, a bigger story, in what happened with the system, ” Mr. Chanos said. In his first run at Wall Street, Mr. Stone produced characters and a portrayal that lived longer than he ever expected and with unintended consequences. But he never would have made a second version if it didn’t appear that the system, and high finance, had finally been brought to its knees. “We wouldn’t have done this movie in 2006, ” he said. “Things were too loose. I didn’t want to glorify pigs.”

9/8/09