"The Big Short" with Christian Bale and Steve Carrell. I think Bale is a really good actor but he might have been a little too over the top in this one.
The movie is about the housing bubble and financial collapse in 2007. It actually starts out doing a pretty good job explaining some of the details about how we got to where we got in 2007. I was working for one of the major NY banks at the time of the collapse so I had a front row seat to what happened before, during and after the crisis.
The movie does show how many people in different businesses played a role in the crisis, including the government agencies who spent more time and energy auditing entitlement review processes (my comment, not from the movie) than the risky financial products that were involved in the crisis. . But the focus was on how a few bankers, including Bale, foresaw the real estate bubble and looked to short real-estate securities to make huge amounts of money when the bubble burst. It is all very interesting.
The movie does not really cover everything. For example, it didn't really get into the companies like AIG that insured much of the debt but when the crisis hit did not have enough cash to pay the banks what was insured. It also didn't get into the role Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in pushing small mortgage banks to make risky loans. What many people do not realize is that the big banks never made subprime loans. They bought them from the mortgage banks which pumped out bad loans and sold them quickly to avoid having to keep capital on reserve. The big banks were stupid and greedy because the did not review what they were buying. I can tell you where I worked there were probably about 5 to 10 people in the entire company that had a management role in securitized loans, swaps, and CDOs. After the crisis, they were all fired, some with no severance packages. Those of us who had nothing to do with what happened lost our 401ks, bonuses, had salaries frozen for several years, and many others lost their jobs. Those big bad banks are made up of a lot of little people too.
The entire disaster was way more complicated than the movie could cover, and so were the problems that resulted. Still it is an interesting movie from the perspective of a few smart guys who saw the bubble early and were looking for a way to exploit it for even more money. Even though the crisis seems to be in the rear view mirror for a while now the movie does ring a few bells.
I give it a 6.5 out of 10. I would have given it a higher rating but the writers got lazy at the end with the "no one went to prison" narrative, except one little guy. I am not going to say what happened was fair, but the circumstances were way more complicated than just throwing people in prison, especially since the ratings agencies failed to do their jobs, and the government agencies green lighted a lot of what happened. No one in particular was to blame, but everyone was to blame.
