Boiler Room
Boiler Room Boiler room is a story about a college dropout name of Seth. He likes the feeling of earning fast money, therefore he decided to quit school and start an underground casino in his apartment with a few of his friends. However, his father, who is a federal judge, finds out about the casino. His father then commends him to close down the casino and search for a real job. Seth wants to regain respect and approval from his father, and fortunately he got introduce to a stockbroker company J. T. Marlin.
Seth has a great talent in this job and he becomes the best trainee in the firm. He works under the senior brokers, and starting to adapt to the “Always be closing” philosophy, which means he never take no as the answer and will keep convincing the customers until he objective is reached. Very soon, Seth becoming a successful broker and neglect all the unethical issues he is committing. He not only sells stocks to the rich “whales”, he also drags the poor workers that can barely afford a new house into the scam.
Unfortunately, Seth discovers the truth about the numerous stocks sold by the firm and realizes J. T. Marlin is a boiler room that sells non-profitable stocks. And start to realize that all these times he is forcing customers to buy something that they don’t want or cannot afford. There are quite a few of unethical dilemmas throughout the movie. First of all, Seth and his firm are selling non-profitable stocks to rich people that are interested in high return investment. Moreover, J. T.
Marlin teaches their employees to tell untrue statement about the stock and the company in order to attract the clients’ interest toward the stocks. The drug that helps infants to develop is one of the examples they mention in the movie. Also, at the middle of the movie, once the brokers see the rip increase, they will try to push the customers even harder in order to make a fortune for themselves. Furthermore, the more skillful Seth becomes, the more we can see Seth is using different powerful persuasive techniques in order to catch the attention of the clients.
On the other hand, it is very unethical for Seth to drag the poor people into buy stock that will never be profitable, because they are selling stock for companies that don’t exist. However, there is still an ethical side of Seth. For example, he tries to protect his father from losing his job due to try to help Seth from trying to get back J. T. Marlin. He also agrees to work with the FBI to raid J. T. Marlin so that no more victims will fall into their scams. And most of all he helps Harry, the poor investor, to get his life saving back in the end. So it is nice to see Seth changes his mind and try to become clean in the end.
