good film that sums up the housing crisis in 2008 that nearly shut down the economy.
mixed with some comedy (but not overdone), interesting characters, and layman terms on what happened make this a good watch.
8/10
Yeah, I liked it a lot. Read the book, and I thought they did a really good job of finding a way to shift through the mess while still being interesting. And they pretty much kept every important scene from the book. Just jam-packed full of content. The acting was good as well. Glad to see them make someone really nice out of this source material. Hopefully it finds a wide audience, because people should know why the country almost fell apart seven years ago.
The one they showed me in school was called "Inside Job".
Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heros
I hate to give any attention to Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, since the wildly popular book told a fundamentally misleading story of the crisis which sadly has become conventional wisdom. And it wasn’t just harmlessly inaccurate; it directed public and even lawmaker attention away from the real drivers of this debacle.
But the fact that the movie based on the book is now out and getting a lot of attention in the media and even among people I know, it seems necessary to remind readers how the book has done a great disservice by deceiving the public. And that includes influential members of the public; Politico reported that “‘The Big Short’ has been mentioned at least 15 times on the Senate floor and in press conferences and committee hearings.”
Lewis’ tale is neat, plausible to a mass market audience fed a steady diet of subprime markets stupidity and greed, and incomplete in critical ways that render his account fundamentally misleading. It’s almost too bad the book’s so readable, because a lot of people will mistake readability for accuracy,
To make Lewis’ Manichean perspective stick, he has to omit vital facts that would lead to a more accurate, but complicated, less crowd-pleasing tale.
Lewis repeatedly and incorrectly charges that no one on Wall Street, save his merry band of shorts, understood what was happening, because everyone blindly relied on ratings and failed to make their own assessment. By implication, the entire mortgage industry ignored the housing bubble and the frothiness of the subprime market.
This is simply false (although with Bernanke and the persistently cheerleading US business media largely missing this story at the time, the “whocouldanode” defense is treated more seriously than it should be). Many people in the credit markets were aware that the risks were increasing in the subprime and residential real estate markets. Every mortgage industry conference during this period had panels on this topic, every credit committee considered it throughout 2005-07.
Lewis completely ignores the most vital player, the one who was on the other side of the subprime short bets. The notion that “it’s a CDO” is daunting enough to stop the non-financial reader in his tracks. The author is remarkably uncurious about who the end investors were for CDOs.
Eisman recognizes that the subprime market is a disaster waiting to happen, a monstrous fire hazard that, once lit, will engulf the housing market and financial firms. Yet he continues to throw Molotov tails at it. Eisman is no noble outsider. He is a willing, knowing co-conspirator. Even worse, he and the other shorts Lewis lionizes didn’t simply set off the global debt conflagration, they made the severity of the crisis vastly worse.
So it wasn’t just that these speculators were harmful, and Lewis gave them a free pass. He failed to clue in his readers that
the actions of his chosen heroes drove the demand for the worst sort of mortgages and turned what would otherwise have been a “contained” problem into a systemic crisis.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/...nto-heros.html
iow, The Big Short is mostly A Big Lie, makes money for the film people, makes stupid for the viewers.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 01-01-2016 at 08:40 AM.
just a transfer of wealth from the t axpayer to the recipients gettin bailed out...fck that
u know whose winning? bust or boom real estate agents
My heart goes out to anyone who has to put up with boutons irl on a daily basis
Huh boots? In the end of the movie Carrell's character says everyone knew exactly what they were doing, that the banks weren't stupid, they knew taxpayers would bail them out.
Obviously, you didn't understand what Yves said, if you bothered to read it, esp the part about The Big Short making a hero of one of the guys who was actually a bomb thrower, about who was creating the demand for toxic mortgages which drove the mortgage originators to write even more toxic mortgages which were packaged up and bet on to fail.
I understood it fine head, of course they were the bad guys. I said the article was wrong when they said the movie acted like the banks didn't know exactly what they were doing.
The article is also wrong in the sense that plenty of the banks legitimately didn't know what they were doing. I think it's pretty obvious Lehman Brothers had no ing idea what kind of subprime trash was on its balance sheet.
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