Inside Job

Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job" is like a documentarial "Usual Suspects". While the film by Bryan Singer highlighted the exploits of a team of professional criminals and a job gone horrifically wrong under the watchful eye of the mastermind Keyser Soze - Ferguson pulls the cover off the wrongdoings of a cabal of professional bankers and how their string pulling misdeeds and pursuit of personal riches resulted in a meltdown of the world financial system - echoes of which will be felt for years... maybe decades.

Winner of the Academy Award for best feature documentary of 2010, "Inside Job" opens with a brief expose of how Iceland was an early victim of the hype and and misunderstood potential of derivatives trading. It was a neat little teaser of a story (which has the potential of being a feature length documentary on it's own), that leads into the main target in Ferguson's scope: Wall Street bankers and their lust for profit.

Interviews with former employees of some of the institutional culprits are very enlightening. After particularly bombastic revelations in the film are made concerning some big players in the industry, a black screen with white type is displayed saying "Goldman Sachs" or "Alan Greenspan" or "The SEC" was "unavailable for comment for this film". The list of players who turned a blind eye in the interest of exorbitant personal gain is a known fact, but to hear their colleagues and the likes of George Soros interviewed giving the gritty details is a nice reinforcement.

A lot of great journalism has been produced surrounding the events addressed during the encapsulating footage of "Inside Job". Much as the documentary "The Smartest Guys in the Room" served the masses in explaining the Enron collapse, "Inside Job" with it's easy to understand charts and simplified language is the perfect film to embrace this subject. If you've kept a finger on the pulse of the mortgage crisis and the floundering of Lehman Brothers, AIG and Bear Stearns, you will find that this documentary presents a clear concise retelling of how it all went down. Ferguson's accusatory bit of film-making is a welcome addition to the canon. For those wanting to dive a bit deeper into the economic mechanisms behind this event, highly recommended reading would be "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The recent global financial meltdown will go down in history as one of those singularly defining events that characterizes what is wrong with society. If we always suspected that greed and corruption were at the heart of the human condition but could never prove it, 2008 changed all that. Charles Ferguson's award-winning film, "Inside Job" takes us inside the various American financial institutions where this monstrous scheme of corporate deregulation was hatched in the years leading up to the ultimate crisis. Instead of reviewing the chain of events which are already well-known, Ferguson visits a number of the big players after the fact to get their view on why global financial markets virtually seized up in September 2008. Most of the big-name operators who capitalized on derivatives, subprime mortgages, and credit swaps were from the Wall Street fraternity. Prominent investment bankers like Blankfein, Paulson, Fudal and other lesser knowns openly encouraged the multi-billion dollar sales of questionable securities which they then proceeded to go short on. In this era, government regulators from the Fed and Treasury turned a blind eye to these seriously unethical practices that threatened the very integrity of the American financial system. Not only were American banks and insurance companies in the thick of this concerted drive to unload bad debt on unsuspecting clients, European banks were caught up in it too. Icelandic banks were privatized and became involved in arranging over a hundred billion dollars in dodgy loans that eventually destroyed the country's economy when they were called in. What I found particularly useful and instructive about this documentary is its ability to get behind the scenes to ask the tough questions of the supporting cast of economists such as Tyson, Feldstein, Summers, and Geithner who promoted the concept of deregulation and grew very wealthy from it. Fast forward to the supposed age of Obama and financial reform, and we find that many of the Wall Street architects of the last debacle still hold positions of influence in government, forcing the new administration to go soft on rooting out the culture of greed and corruption. The film leaves us with the troubling thought that only in America can a financial engineer make vastly more than a civil engineer, even when what they produce is manufactured out of thin air. Nowhere in this production will you find an outright admission of guilt from those who created this crisis. It is almost as if silence or denial is part of the reward of fleecing one's fellow being.

SnowPharaoh, you said this documentary was sensationalist? Well perhaps a little to jazz it up a bit, but not as much as Michael Moore telling Americans that Canadians don't lock their doors, based on his experience in Sarnia, Ontario. Everything about this documentary was well researched and supported, including all the warnings, articles and books about the coming global financial crisis.

Matt Damon does an excellent job. The complexity of the derivatives market, particularly the CDO's, is spelled out nicely in layman's terms for the average viewer. Although, as with any documentary, you need to pay close attention. I've watched it a few times now, I highly recommended this as one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.