S1, E7: After the economic hardship of the 1970's perhaps a period of excess was inevitable. Mammon was king as wealth and materialism assumed a dominant place in American culture and politics. It's a decade of junk bonds, S&L bailouts and pervasive Wall Street corruption. Tom Wolfe wrote about the "Masters of the Universe," and Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and Charles Keating went from the business page to the front page as their criminal activities were exposed. And in a classic case of art imitating life, a line from a motion picture seemed to set the tone for the entire decade.
