"Margin Call": The legacy of Financial Ethics

Shahzhob Ali, ACCA
2 min readJun 5, 2024

“Margin Call” is more than a movie, it is a journey of ethics and finance. At the time of 2008 financial crisis, it showed the intense world for investment banking, showed us the moral values, extremely tough decisions faced by those working at wall street. As the story continues, there is Excess Ambition, Greed and extremely tough choices. At the end, we have learned most important lessons of our life i.e how to be responsible,honest and what Human means.

  • Ethical Dilemma: Characters at the movie face tough moral choices and high pressure decisions with no clear distinction between what is right and what is wrong.
  • Problems in global financial systems: Exploring the 2008 financial unstablity and understanding the problems which lie in the global financial system. To analyze how market up and down affects business and financial institution. Understanding why strong controls, rules and oversight keep the financials stable.
  • Leadership: Here showing how the characters face the chaos of financial crisis and how they do crisis management. Here Leaders deal with extremely tough situations and ethical dilemma in tough situations. To see how leaders will perform if they being honest, with proper communication and make quick decisions when things not in there favor.
  • Accountability: To understand the benefits and importance of being accountable for there decisions. Accountability helps them to help them grow and learn from their mistakes, errors making better for future.
  • Legacy: Movie gives the lesson about ethical impact on financials. There will be responsibilities if you want to get success in life. You must have to be accountable for that. You have to to be honest in everything you do.

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