good movie. has a few shortcomings so read the book as well,
Full disclosure, I’m an economics and political junkie and a recovering Stock Broker, just so you know.
This movie is about the housing bubble and crash of 2008. The director does a good job of explaining SOME of the things that happened, no mention of the ultimate causes of the bubble and crash which were all political and not generated by banks but walking in midway in the plot line, so to speak.
The directore tells his story through four sets of investors who saw the collapse coming and were in a position to ‘short’ the market through credit swaps, an esoteric type of option. It gets preachy toward the end as the directory is obviously philosophically a democrat and wants desperately to blame the whole thing on big business or banks or the system or something other than a more or less rational response to an impossible political situation. Of course the bonds only worth what the underlying mortages were worth (that is to say next to nothing) and he does explain the bubble wonderfully well. Of course the banks / mortgage brokers tried to unload this junk they were forced to write by Barney Frank et al, who wouldn’t?
These few were by no means the only ones to the crisis coming but they were among the very few to figure out how to profit from it. Does that make them heroes? Well maybe, in a way, sort of, I guess. In the end no one really blamed ‘immigrants and poor people’ as repeatedly stated in the movie, how could they? And the part about almost ‘no one went to jail’ is true but why would they? This behavior, the writing of the original mortgages that caused the bubble and collapse was not only legal it was actually mandated by law.
This is a movie ultimately without real heroes and not much really in the way of villains either, just pathos and black humor. All in all a movie well worth seeing and a good intro to the book of the same name.
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