the Big Short

[Lauren Johnson]

I was amazed at how the film taught impossibly dense concepts. Can you imagine a Hollywood film throwing around terms like mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, collateral debt obligations, the NINJA's (no job, no assets), and even the impossible synthetic CDO.

Here is a complaint on the movie by Michael Grunwald, who helped The Big Asshole, Timothy Geitner write his memoir. His whole article is worth reading if not for a good lesson on how to write a limited hangout. Everything is fine now that we have new regulations and look a the jobs that were created, etc. What Grunwald does not address is the wisdom and even morality of creating huge amounts of capital to be wagered on providing a basic need of housing. This question would lead directly to the issue of the vast wealth gap that now exists in the world.

The Big Short is designed to make people angry. Maybe it wouldn't have succeeded as a work of art if it had ended with responsible government crisis managers making horribly unpopular decisions that stabilized the financial system and prevented a second Great Depression. But that's what happened, and people ought to know that. Taxpayers didn't get shafted; the bailouts ended up turning a profit for the government. The financial system is not perfectly safe, and never will be, but it is dramatically safer. Many of the big banks are still big, but bigness was not what caused the crisis, and the Sanders proposal to take a hatchet to big banks, while emotionally satisfying, would be bad public policy.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2...z3xSd2wy00

Here is a much better and stronger criticism of The Big Short (the book) from Naked Capitalism. Yves Smith doesn't like the book and therefore the movie much at all. Her article is really good.