Inside Job - Movie Review
Charles.H.Ferguson's Inside Job (2010) talks of the inception, growth, decay and final collapse of U.S.financial industry due to systemic corruption.
Trailer of Inside Job
This five-part documentary won the Oscar(2011) in the best documentary feature, Directors Guild of America award(2010) for best documentary and the Writers Guild of America for the best documentary screenplay.
This five-part documentary begins it's narrative by Matt Damon starting from the 1980's.The big financial giants promised size and trust. The internet bubble burst of the 2000's was followed by an interest in derivative. All this destabilised the market. A new financial product called collateralised debt obligations that picked up mortgages indiscriminately, bundled them and sold them as investments were being marketed by the big financial players.
In the second part, the Bubble the documentary presents how credit default swaps or CDS were being used to bet against mortgage-backed CDOs.Financial players who were expected to advise their clients to not invest in this fundamentally weak CDO's were wheedling clients to stock more of this hollow investment device.
In the third part of the Inside Job, The Crisis banks were left holding CDOs, loans and real estate worth billions of dollars. Bailouts became the flavour of the season.
So large were the debts on financial agencies like Freddy mac and Fannie Mae, that the government bailed them out. Lehman brothers declared bankruptcy and crashed. The Fed and Henry Paulson, Secretary of Treasury asked Congress for a 700 billion dollar bailout. A flood of foreclosures followed as did plenty of layoffs.
In the fourth part Inside Job informs us that none of the big fish who were directly responsible for this mammoth sized economic crisis that forever changed the lives of so many ordinary citizens were either arrested or made accountable. In fact they lost nothing, only awarding themselves and their chosen ones big bonuses, thanks to the bailout. These big fish then resisted every attempt to make the U.S. financial system more transparent and accountable.
In the final fifth part of the documentary our narrator does not have a happy ending. People who worked hard, trusted companies like Merill Lynch, Goldman Sachs for sound financial advice were over-leveraged and out of jobs, thanks in part to very bad counsel and the economic crisis.
The Obama administration did not bring into force strong policy regulating the market and compensation.
Move on interviews Charles.H.Ferguson on his take on what the government was doing to tackle the after-effect of the financial crisis, including the Dodd-Frank Act.