I just finished watching this incredible film, that won the 2010 Oscar for best documentary. I’m kind of surprised the SDMB of all places doesn’t have a thread about it. Or maybe I did a shitty job of searching, in which case… My bad?
It’s basically an overview of the financial crisis of recent years, which we are still recovering from. The thesis seems to be that the regulations that were put in place after the Great Depression have been systematically dismantled since the Reagan years (powered by Wall Street lobbyists) which played a pivotal role in this meltdown and lesser ones in previous years. And very little is being done to fix this faulty system and the ones that should be held liable are not and still filthy, filthy rich and very powerful.
I’m just as financially illiterate as the next guy but they do a great job framing it in a way that’s easy for a layman to understand. And man I don’t think I’ve ever been this angry after watching a movie, and this isn’t a Michael Moore film with all that manipulative fluff (maybe a teensy weensy bit, but not nearly enough to take away from it).
BUT because I’m not an expert, I do have a certain degree of skepticism, since the only knowledge I have is basically what the director presented to me. But I do like to think I have a finely honed bullshit detector that didn’t really go off at any point. I do get this feeling though there has to be another side to this story, but that just might be me not wanting to believe this horribly unjust situation. It is something though watching the Dean of Columbia Business School get flabbergasted and angry when asked about his affiliations to financial firms that seem to basically buy his expert scholarly approval.
Highly recommended, it’ll make you “smart angry” as one reviewer put it.
I saw it. I didn’t think much of it. I found their analysis of a lot of issues to be rather shallow and ill-informed. Shallowness, I suppose, can’t be avoided in a two-hour documentary about an extremely complex series of events that occurred over many years, but some of their conclusions are pretty bizarre.
For example, as I recall, the film spends a lot of time bemoaning the fact that the US no longer has a wall of separation between commercial banks and investment banks since the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.
What they didn’t bother to mention was that due to the long history of relatively liberal SEC regulations and court decisions since the 1930’s, most of Glass-Steagall was essentially already neutered.
They also place a lot of blame on the allowed merger between commercial and investment banks, without bothering to note that the no other country ever required such a separation. (Except Japan at some times, I think.)
It’s been a long time since I saw it, but I remember thinking that their conclusions were flawed in several other areas as well.
I think the filmmakers were being naive in a lot of parts, and downright dishonest in others. They had a particular agenda and did not present things accurately.
Huh, maybe you’re a lot better informed on the area than I am so that’s why our opinions differ. But I think it would be inaccurate to say that the film spends a lot of time on Glass-Steagall and the investment and commercial bank mergers. It’s mentioned only once in the movie to note (perhaps inaccurately, as you suggest), its repeal made it easier for banks to become lumbering behemoths, I think.
I dunno if there’s ever been a thread here dedicated to the movie, but there have been threads on the same subject matter that were *much more *informative and educational, yet also more boring. The movie has to try to be accessible to the masses and tries to fit the “common sense” narrative that everything is completely rigged and has to be some form of conspiracy. As I recall, it never really cries “conspiracy!” outright, but it repeatedly implies it, then leaves the viewer to “connect the dots.”
Yeah, that was one of the things I remembered from it, but like I said it’s been a while since I saw it. I just remembered it was one of the things I was annoyed about.
Take my opinions with a grain of salt too, though. I follow this stuff in the news and read a lot about it, but I’m not an expert. I don’t work in the financial industry and I’m no law-talkin’ guy.
AS you correctly point out it was only a 2 hour movie. It was not a legal treatise but rather an exposition of what they viewed as the reasons for the collapse. They were under no obligation to explain that other opinions may differ. I know nothing about Glass-Steagall but taking you at your word, how does the fact that the act was basically neutered before it was overturned invalidate the filmaker’s argument that the lack of a separation between divisions was a source of the collapse?
Additionally how is it relevant that no other country saw fit to enact such a separation, if in fact that was a cause of the collapse? Universal blindness does not mean that the problems did not exist.
My opinion of the cause of the crises was that Alan Greenspan had a different view of the duties of the Federal Reserve Chairman than did Brooksley Born who, upon realizing that there was no regulation or even oversight of the trillion dollar derivatives business complained to her superiors and alerted them to the potential disaster and was promptly separated from her office. Greenspan supposedly told her that he assumed that she believed that there should be laws against fraud in the banking industry and he did not.
The interview with Mishkin, an economics professor, was upsetting to me. His report on deregulation, commissioned by the big Icelandic banks, was entitled “Financial stability in Iceland”.
After the Icelandic banking system collapsed, Mishkin, changed the title of his report on his resume to “Financial Instability in Iceland”.
When this was pointed out to him, he claimed it was a typo.
Like all of you, I’ve studied elementary economics in high school but I haven’t studied any more of it since then because I always had the opinion that economic theory is closer to voodoo (and I don’t mean that in a complimentary way) than any other science. In fact, to call it a science is kind of a joke. You can use economic theory to critique any economic system as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, depending on what you focus on.
I think some of the comments on the article did a better of job of criticizing it than I ever could. It wasn’t too clear on what the movie got “wrong”. Is the article trying to say “the high priests of money-handling have reasons they want to get it right but the whims of the economy are hard to divine so it was an honest mistake”? If so, I’m not sure we watched the same movie because incentives are fairly thoroughly discussed I thought, or rather the distinct lack of disincentives to take massive, reckless risks in a deregulated market.
If there was a conspiracy theory in there, I’m not sure what it would it be. A bad system that’s being supported by the ones who seek to most benefit from it? Isn’t that like a recurring theme in history?
Admittedly it’s more subtle and not as overt because there so many mechanisms are in place for checks and balances but no system is perfect and it seems a powerful group with an agenda can exert more influence than they should be able to.