A review of the “Money for Nothing” movie aired in the UK in 1993

Money, Money, Money was originally posted on Flickr by Daniel Borman and is reused here under the terms and conditions of the Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons license

If “Money for Nothing” wasn’t a movie, it could easily be an economics lesson.

The main character of the movie is a student who has already shown a keen interest in economics and investing at the age of 16.

As early as 1993, when most people wouldn’t even imagine of owning a personal computer and using it, he has his own portfolio of shares and uses a computer to manage this portfolio.

When his economics teacher asks him to prepare a 2000-word assignment for homework, in which, he is required to discuss aspects of the real estate market, he instead has a bet with his best friend that he can become a millionaire in a week, starting out completely broke.

This is fully in line with the extreme optimism that was abundant in the 1990s, when it comes to financial matters, and also in life, in general. Dreaming big was the result of the dominant mindset of the time, according to which, there was nothing wrong with people thinking that they could achieve anything in life.

The UK’s economy was getting out of a long period of recession. This, combined with other world-changing events, such as the formation of the EU, which gave a major economic boost to the global economy then, allowed people to adopt a more positive outlook on life, and hope that things would improve. The song: “Things can only get better” by D:Ream is characteristic of the spirit that pervaded that era. In this sense, nobody could blame a teenager for making a statement that he would become a millionaire in just one week.

Back then, student finance was generously available to students, and an overdraft facility was somehow pre-approved with a standard student bank account, not to mention the provision of cheque books and cheque bank guarantee cards. Therefore, a student would tend to believe that they didn’t really need money to have access to goods and services; they only needed credit, which they would pay back at some later point in time, although this point was not very clear (hopefully, after graduating and getting a decent job with an attractive salary).

Setting goals too high has a big drawback that has to do with missing everyday real-life opportunities that simply pass by. This holds true in career, business, and financial prosperity, as well as in enjoying a healthy, down-to-earth personal life. In fact, once goals are set too high, they may never be achieved, thus resulting in failure, and causing a person to lose precious time that could be better spent on more realistic pursuits.

This is the case with our inexperienced and highly ambitious teenage student who thinks that the world is his oyster, and after also getting encouraged by his equally ignorant and inexperienced best mate, you can imagine that you have a mixture that is ready to explode, just like a time bomb that is about to burst any time.

In spite of the many conclusions that can be drawn and lessons taught by this film, one thing is for certain, that if Gary Christopher Worrall had listened to his teacher and done his homework, he would probably have avoided all this trouble that he got himself into. If he had been clever enough to actually study, find out about the fluctuations of the real estate market and risks of investing in it, and finally complete his assignment, as he was asked, he would have realized how foolish, naive, and dangerous, as it was proved, his idea of becoming a millionaire in a week without any capital and money really was.

Sources and further reading:

Nostalgia: Money for Nothing

Money for Nothing

Money For Nothing 1993 Directed by Mike Ockrent