WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2015
"The Big Short" has fun with the Wall Street
behavior that led to the housing bubble and the 2008 meltdown
The Big Short (2015), directed by Adam McKay, is a
delicious satire of the financial shenanigans that led to the Collapse of 2008,
and it's based on the book by Michael Lewis, 'The Big Short: Inside the
Doomsday Machine', reviewed on my books blog April 6, 2010.
The film traces, with a lot of humor, how several
financial gurus tried to set themselves up to profut
from an eventual collapse of the housing bubble. In the beginning, it's the M.D. Michael Burry
(a likeable Christian Bale), whose introversion led him away from patient care
into making money on finance. With his unusually focused mathematical mind he
put it all together (after looking at the loans in actual portfolios), seeing
that once adjustable rate mortgages reset,
inadequately qualified home buyers would start defaulting, meaning that bond
funds built on the 'securitized' mortgages would eventually collapse. Of
course, that insight was predicated also on the idea that home prices couldn't
grow forever, even with low interest rates.
Neil Irwin has a piece in The New York Times about
what this movie gets right and wrong about the housing bubble. People were
getting wary, according to Google searches, around the late summer of 2005.
The second major lead is Mark Baum (renamed from the
real life Steve Eisman ) who would protest conventional wisdom of paid financial
speakers at various forums. There's a
line 'Truth is like poetry, and most people hate poetry'. I can remember a paid
speaker at a ReliaStar/ING forum in August 2001 who predicted a 35000 Dow. Baum
is played by a shameless Steve Carell, who looks like he has never recovered by
his self-sacrifice as a '40-year-old virgin'.
I particularly loved the scene with the woman heading
a ratings agency, which make the whole rating business sound like a formalized
Yelp.
Then there is the tag team of Jamie and Charlie (Finn
Wittrock -- conspicuously "th-mooth", as
this doesn't get past my eyes -- and John Magaro).
Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett (based on Greg Lippmann)m and Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert (based on Ben
Hockett). Brad Pitt is listed as a producer.
The film makes use of "mockumentary" (well known from "Modern Family") commentary
directly to the camera from most characters, with comic effect; it also
provides a glossary of terms and Wall Street slang along the bottom of the
screen sometimes.
At one point, Anthony Bourdain ("Parts
Unknown") makes a guest appearance, having fun making a stew for "The
Leftovers" from "free fish".
At the end, the film takes the cynical position that
the banks, after their bailout, now blame the world's problems on immigrants
and poor people. Who does that sound
like?
During the period right after the crisis and through
the bailout, my own blogs achieved their best numbers ever. Panic sells news stories.
I saw the film opening night at the AMC Shirlington in
Arlington, before a sold-out crowd. The auditorium, with reclining seats, is
still large enough for a wider screen; unfortunately
the screen was vertically cropped for the 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
Posted by Bill Boushka at 8:27 PM
Labels: corporate exposures, financial crisis,
financial trading, satire
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