April 6, 2011
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Inside Job
The lesson is, of course, Be The Winner
and China is Too Big to be Left.
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Kyle Smith, New York Post, 8 Oct 2010
It’s two years after the crash. If you still don’t know what a credit default swap is, you can pay 12 bucks to find out from “Inside Job,” an incoherent but thoroughly outraged documentary about the financial crisis.
Director Charles Ferguson, whose last film, the Iraq doc “No End in Sight,” came out at the exact historical moment when the end of Iraq’s chaos appeared on the horizon to all but the willfully blind, assembles an anti-Wall Street screed that eschews Michael Moore’s prankish clowning but shares Moore’s eccentric views. The endless skein of talking heads and bar graphs make no attempt to be cinematic and will have even the most excitable viewers struggling to stay alert.The many valid points made — for instance, about the abysmal conflict-of-interest-driven nonperformance of securities-rating agencies such as Moody’s, which rated baskets of iffy mortgages as tiptop investments — have been made many times before. But stuffed into the sober analysis like a cow patty in a sesame-seed bun is Ferguson’s hysterical (in both senses) reliance on half-truths, irrelevant chatter, self-contradiction and sheer nonsense. Ferguson and narrator Matt Damon tell us at the outset that the financial crisis caused the recession; an hour later we learn that the recession started eight months before the crash. Oops.
We’re asked both to feel bad over how our banks hurt Chinese manufacturing (cry me a river — China’s economy is growing more than 10 percent a year) and to be angry at how perfidious our manufacturers were to move jobs to China. Ferguson is outraged at the bailout of AIG — but he’s also outraged that Lehman wasn’t bailed out.
Ferguson is unintentionally funny when presenting a segment on the subprime lender Countrywide Financial. He doesn’t explain how it bought Sen. Chris Dodd, who is retiring because of the scandal, and he fails to go into detail about the most blatantly disturbing and costliest corner of the whole mess. At the banks, stupid doesn’t mean illegal. Sorry, but “greed” is not a crime. The bankers didn’t expect that their bad bets would be covered by the public purse. In some cases, they weren’t.
But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which enjoyed implicit government backing, were set up to be allowed to bet with us covering their follies. The bank bailouts were mostly repaid; Fan and Fred are endless black holes, having burned through $150 billion of our cash. They’re still hemorrhaging. If you made a movie about their failures, it could only be called “No End in Sight.”
All but ignoring these central issues, Ferguson goes off on wild tangents, obsessing over finance in Iceland (a country with fewer people than Omaha), denouncing college econ professors for consulting with banks and interviewing a shrink about his belief that lots of top Wall Street execs buy hookers and drugs and charge them on their expense accounts.
Name names, please. Or shut up. “I’m certain this is happening, but I have no evidence” doesn’t cut it, even for a shoddy documentary. If absurdly high compensation, insular networking cut off from reality and questionable personal habits really interest Matt Damon, he should do an exposé on his own industry.
