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Movie Takes
Inside Job
Another Michael Moore-like crash course on the Crash of 2008, this time from Charles Ferguson.
There he goes again. Charles Ferguson, the software developer who made the documentary No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq (2007) just as the end was coming into sight, has now, and with equal perspicacity, taken on the task of explaining, cinematically, the crash of 2008. With Inside Job, however, his political targets aren’t limited to the hapless George W. Bush and the Cheneys and Rumsfelds of his administration but include every president since (and including) Ronald Reagan. All are guilty, it seems, of contributing to the economic crisis — though the second President Bush is guiltier than the rest, naturally — through not being left-wing in their economic views. Even President Obama is guilty for not being left-wing enough. Also, and not coincidentally, for putting such other guilty parties as Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner on his economic team.
Apart from anything else, you’ve got to think that this is bad tactics, politically speaking. If everybody is guilty, then nobody is guilty. Much better to demonize only one or two or a handful of guys, as he did in his previous movie. But Hollywood political types have never been reluctant to spread the blame around pretty widely — probably because no administration has ever been left-wing enough to suit them. Mr. Ferguson’s film also loses focus toward the end when it takes up a whole litany of lefty complaints that have been outstanding for years, if not generations, beginning with excessive executive compensation, which at least might have some connection with his ostensible subject, and moving on to the decline in America’s manufacturing base, cuts in funding for public universities leading to higher tuition fees for students, the fact that (allegedly) for the first time the rising generation of Americans will be less well off than their parents, and, inevitably, a federal tax policy which is said to favor the wealthy.
Now where have we heard that before? Yet the implicit promise of Inside Job’s title to uncover hidden secrets and name the guilty parties dwindles down in the end to: “Most of the benefits of the tax cuts went to the wealthiest one per cent of taxpayers.” Do tell! Of course, the wealthiest one per cent of taxpayers pay the most tax, so they will always get most of the benefits of any cut in rates. Duh! It’s a tautology. But the more important point is that most of these outrages to the liberal sensibility have little if anything to do with the crash, and quite a number of things that do have to do with it aren’t mentioned in Inside Job. Likewise, though it is supposedly about the American financial crisis, the film begins with gorgeous photography of — Iceland. Why? Because, up until 2008, so we are told, these idyllic landscapes of geysers and glaciers were the home of a happy and prosperous country with “almost End-of-History status.”
Iceland is, in short, Mr. Ferguson’s Paradise Lost, and the serpent in its volcanic and glacial garden is what he calls, with supreme contempt, “deregulation.” Now privatization, which is what Iceland did to its banks some years ago, is not precisely the same thing, but it’s near enough to suit his purposes. And, to be fair, there must not have a whole lot of regulation either. But whether or not Iceland’s selling off of state-run banks to private investors was, as he claims, “an experiment in deregulation,” it turned out very badly for Iceland as well as for the private investors, since the privatization was succeeded, after a time lag of several years, by a series of such careless investments by bankers working for the now privately run Icelandic banks that the whole country went bankrupt. Post hoc, I guess, ergo propter hoc.
As a result of the success of Michael Moore’s movies and the thinning of the movie-going herd to exclude most of us who are middle-aged and middle-class, documentaries are now made not to tell us or show us things we don’t already know but rather to reinforce our sense of certainty about the things we do know, or think we know. Among that young and overwhelmingly liberal audience today there is probably a solid majority that thinks it knows and wants to be told, if not by Mr. Ferguson then by somebody else, that the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by insufficient government control over the financial sector of the economy, though this is a blatantly political rather than an economic argument. It is, among other things, to pick from a number of contributory causes the one which has always been dear to the heart of the political left and to ignore all the rest.
Moreover, we know that several of the ones that are ignored by Mr. Ferguson came about through ill-judged, ill-managed or corrupt liberal measures or institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Barney Frank, for instance, appears in Inside Job as one of the good guys who, so we are led to believe, has spent his years in Congress hunting down financial wrong-doing on Wall Street. No mention is made of his role as the principal congressional champion of business (and campaign contributions) as usual at Fannie and Freddie, which continue to hemorrhage taxpayers’ money. Here, Fannie and Freddie are simply described as “two giant mortgage lenders on the verge of collapse.” No mention is made of their status as government-sponsored enterprises — just like the Icelandic banks in the good old days before “deregulation” — let alone as milch cows for campaign contributions to Democrats. But what else would you expect from a movie narrated by little Matt Damon?
The loss in intellectual coherence and accuracy is made up for by the increased focus on the alleged villainy of deregulation. Anyone in government or the economics profession who has ever advocated deregulation of any kind can thus be made to share in this villainy. Yet the only actual act of deregulation mentioned by name in the movie is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. George Soros, of all people, gets to tell us what was wrong with that, and he bases his explanation on an analogy with an oil tanker with several water-tight compartments for oil, rather than having it all slosh around in one big tank which could destabilize the ship. So the point is, presumably, that the opportunities available to risk takers were increased, which means that risk increased. This increase in risk-taking in itself, however, could not have produced the crisis. Increased risk also produced increased rewards, and the effects of the financial crisis were magnified not by the increase but by the decrease in risk, or rather a socialization of the risk taken by financial institutions.
About this, the movie has much less to say. Mr. Ferguson (unlike Mr. Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story) appears to have no quarrel with TARP or the other big bailouts of 2008 — presumably on the ground that all government intervention in the market must be for the best — but only with the fact that none of the bailees went to jail and most got to keep their ill-gotten millions. Of course, one can sympathize with him there, but he can hardly be unaware that the bailouts retrospectively made the bad guys’ behavior rational in running such crazy risks, since the risks turned out to have a downside only for the taxpayer. If financial institutions were able to shift their risks onto others, or onto the taxpayer, as they did, that cannot in itself have been the consequence of an act which, in theory, should have increased the risk only to themselves. The explanation that “deregulation” must be to blame makes no sense.
The same is true of the other non-human guilty parties identified by Mr. Ferguson, such as “derivatives” generally and “credit default swaps” in particular. He tells us that derivatives made markets unstable, but no evidence is offered for this proposition. The markets, particularly the housing market and the mortgage market, were unstable anyway, and for reasons that had nothing to do with derivatives. But having established to their own satisfaction that “deregulation” is an all-purpose whipping boy, all they have to say is that derivatives are an “unregulated 50 trillion dollar industry” in order to suggest that they, too, must have been in on the comprehensive evil wrought by deregulation.
Assuming Mr. Ferguson is right to say of the issuers of mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), that “lenders didn’t care if people could repay” their loans,” that only puts (or ought to put) the inquiry back a stage. Why would a lender not care about the repayment of his money? He doesn’t appear to know or care. In the same way, the film is doubtless dead-on in blaming the ratings companies — Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch — for giving bogus triple-A ratings to CDOs that proved to be “toxic assets,” but why they would do anything so likely to put themselves out of business and why did those who depended on those ratings take so long to discover they had been duped? Such questions are not gone into in any detail. The answers, one suspects, might cloud the politically motivated picture of increased regulation and higher taxes as the magic wand that would have made all our problems go away before we ever had them.
Again, credit default swaps are explained as insurance that anybody can take out on anything, even on things he doesn’t own, with a naturally increased risk to the insurance company as a result. But how the insurance company, in this case AIG, managed its risk by shifting it onto the taxpayer is the real story here, not the credit instruments themselves, which are only a means to manage risk when they are used properly. If instead they became a giant scam on the American people, that was because the real insurer, or re-insurer, turned out to be you and me. How did that happen? The complaints about massive private gains at public loss should be directed to those, including both the Bush and Obama administrations and an overwhelming majority of both parties in Congress who were willing to engage in a no-fault bail-out of those who should have been made to pay the price for their own foolishness and profligacy.
But the unwillingness of our political class to exercise any discipline upon the recipients of their billions and trillions was only to be expected, given their unwillingness to allow the market (through deregulation!) to exercise its own discipline. Mr. Ferguson is right to link this unwillingness to the flow of campaign contributions to both parties — but, especially in 2008, especially to Democrats — from Wall Street, but he is also not interested, also unsurprisingly, in following that line of thinking very far. It might interfere with his virtual perp walk of those distinguished economists and government officials who have ever been injudicious enough in the past to have spoken well of the economic benefits of deregulation and who are foolish enough in the present to have submitted themselves to the gotcha style of editing that Mr. Ferguson has apparently learned from Mr. Moore.
These are, principally, Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University Business School and formerly chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, as well as Martin Feldstein, now a Professor at Harvard who held the same office under President Reagan. Frederic Mishkin, formerly of the Federal Reserve board and now of Columbia, and Scott Talbott of the Financial Services Roundtable also get it in the neck, as well as some others whose names I have forgotten. Neither Alan Greenspan nor Ben Bernanke cooperated. Messrs. Summers and Geithner, like other members of the current administration, and Henry Paulson from the previous one, also wisely avoided Mr. Ferguson’s cameras. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that those gentlemen, who appear only in file footage, have seen more movies and so were better aware than those who turned up on screen in person what sort of treatment they were likely to get.
Just to enliven a bit what is otherwise his parade of talking heads, Mr. Ferguson includes a salacious bit about how the Wall Street high flyers who brought the economy low were also known for their indulgence in cocaine and prostitutes. There is an interview with a woman who ran a ring of call girls. This is all very bad, of course, though it’s a little hard to see how we can blame it on either deregulation or credit default swaps. It is said that cocaine stimulates the same part of the brain as does money-lust, but it probably did the same even in Iceland before the fall. It is particularly piquant to have Eliot Spitzer on camera, too, as one of the good guys who (so it is hinted by him, anyway) would have stopped the crash single-handedly, if all his prosecutions had been taken up during his days as New York Attorney General. But for some reason, he has no comment on the high-priced hookers his targets were allegedly hooked on. The crash may be hard to understand, but Charles Ferguson is here to simplify things by telling you that all you need to know is there are a lot of bad people around — and all of them have economic and political views to the right of Charles Ferguson’s.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (51) | Leave a comment
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Bob K.| 11.3.10 @ 7:41AM
WHY IS THE EDITORIAL STAFF HERE INFLICTING READERS WITH THESE NEW SOUND BASED ADVERTISEMENTS?
Ken (Old Texican)| 11.3.10 @ 11:31AM
Bob K.
Hit your mute button, stupid, and shut up.
They need the advertising revenue. You want to replace that revenue with your own cash?
There still ain't no free lunch, Bozo!
I contribute on a re-curring monthly basis. Do you?
Alan Brooks| 11.3.10 @ 10:37PM
Michael the Sveldte Moore has a new film in the can:
'Fahrenheit 2008'
Third World| 11.3.10 @ 10:03AM
Bowman is just a right-wing shill with a subnormal intelligence. Don't pay any attention to him. Examples:
"If everybody is guilty, then nobody is guilty."
Not everybody is guilty but those who are, are guilty.
He has a problem with the movie complaining about "a federal tax policy which is said to favor the wealthy." And his reply to this claim is "Of course, the wealthiest one per cent of taxpayers pay the most tax, so they will always get most of the benefits of any cut in rates. Duh!"
Righto. And that's exactly why we should not be giving tax cuts to the wealthy. Duh!
Then we have this: "both the Bush and Obama administrations ... who were willing to engage in a no-fault bail-out of those who should have been made to pay the price for their own foolishness and profligacy."
You can have your own opinions but not your own facts. The "bail-out", by which he means the TARP program, was done by the Bush administration. Obama had nothing to do with it.
The rest of Bowman's remarks are equally fatuous. If this article is an example of the kind of dishonest, partisan thinking we can expect from the Republican Tea Party, then the next few years are going to be unpleasant for all of us.
Ken (Old Texican)| 11.3.10 @ 11:34AM
Third World,
I like your new screen name.
Sorry,
We still can't fix stupid, Stupid, even with a new screen name.
x66o4| 11.3.10 @ 11:43AM
thnk you, ken. somebdy had to say it. this jerk has been polluting our web site for waaaayy too long.
Southern Redneck| 11.3.10 @ 11:50AM
Of course this movie is all wrong. The real cause of our economic woes is the lazy left wing commies who just want a free ride. Those hard-working bankers and Wall Street rip-off artists are just trying to live the American dream, and they are succeeding darn well at it. We at TAS admire them!
Proud to be an American| 11.3.10 @ 12:46PM
Ken, you are a little too free with your use of the epithet "stupid". Are you so sure you are smarter than everybody else? Has it ever occurred to you that you might not be? Have you ever changed your opinion on anything?
If your answers are yes, no, no, then you are the stupid one.
Eddie Kovacs| 11.3.10 @ 1:58PM
No, if his answers are yes, no, and no, then he's just being honest. You're the stupid one for trying to deny reality; just about anyone would be smarter than leftards like "Third World" and his defenders (you, for example).
Proud to be an American| 11.3.10 @ 2:57PM
"No, if his answers are yes, no, and no, then he's just being honest."
Yes, I suppose so. And what he is being honest about is that he has a closed mind, unable to entertain any ideas beyond what he has already fixed upon.
Such people are completely useless for any positive purpose. They will never be of any value in finding solutions to the many problems this country faces, like the withered economy, massive unemployment, federal deficits and debt, threats from terrorists, etc, etc.
There is a word for people like that. Brain-dead.
skip| 11.3.10 @ 11:43AM
How about the fact Barney, Fannie, and Freddie are glossed over?
The movie sounds like it was written by a committee headed by RCV, Dred, Canuckistani, Alan Brooks, and now Third World.
Readers should respect the opinions of the above five as authoritative on econimics because ______?
just saw the movie - factcheck| 11.22.10 @ 10:32PM
wrt to fannie/freddie at least, i don't know that they were "glossed over". franklin raines, including his link to obama, was singled out in the movie. he got as much facetime as several of the CEOs targeted in the movie.
Alan Brooks| 11.3.10 @ 10:39PM
"Bowman is just a right-wing shill"
And Bowman is the best one at AS-- unlike most Americans, Bowman has good taste. Ancient Rome was like that, too.
Patricia Ades| 1.12.11 @ 6:22PM
I agree....like the economic professors in the film, he's probably paid to write this crap. Who hired him anyway...he's a right to the right fascist and he should go away. By the way I have no political affilliation, just plain common sense. Remind me not to read th American Spectator ever again!!!!!
Third World| 11.3.10 @ 11:37AM
Go fuck yourself.
JKS| 11.3.10 @ 1:43PM
Ah, the intellectual retorts from libtards.
We know you are projecting. After all, if this was anatomically possible, we would never see you comment here.
Citizen Kane| 11.3.10 @ 3:11PM
According to "Dick" Cheney, it is.
Eddie Kovacs| 11.3.10 @ 1:52PM
Ooh. A leftard loser calling himself "Third World" is UNHAPPY.
Third World| 11.3.10 @ 2:59PM
An excellent observation, Eddie, though I fail to see the logic by which you conclude that I am a leftard, a loser or UNHAPPY.
The only thing is, Eddie, I am not a leftard, loser, nor UNHAPPY. But I suspect you are miserable.
Macy| 2.28.11 @ 2:43PM
Why do you use the name of an appealing movie star? Do you think you are an appealing movie star? Did you get his permission? Do you think you have the right to preempt his name and attach your views to it?
Alan Brooks| 11.3.10 @ 10:41PM
Third World,
the parallels between ancient Rome and present-day America are uncanny:
Good agriculture
Substandard schools
Trash culture
High crime
Phil Weisberg| 5.24.11 @ 8:31AM
Too much of this critique centers on words like "liberal" and mentioning names like Michael Moore or Matt Damon instead of actually talking about the many points presented in the movie. I suppose it is not within the value system of the author to discuss how conflicts of interest in academia and financial services can lead to dishonest information that is acted on by a trusting public. Self-interest seemed to be the mantra of those in government and the private sector. However, the money involved came from all people who invest including pension plans. This movie could not possibly cover everything but it did an excellent job in using the words of the unethical people to show what happened. The American Spectator article is what really does not show a broad analysis of the movie.
Apostate| 11.7.10 @ 7:58AM
Bowman is frighteningly off the mark. If you take the risks framed in the movie and discount them by 50% and then discount them again by 50% it should still raise the hair on the back of your neck. The film does a nice jog of connecting the dots between wall street, academia, the insurance industry, the banking industry and the public officials in government - all part of the mix aimed at fueling and feeding the greed. Supply side economics...what I like to refer to as the horse and the sparrow model, privatization, deregulation, and the destructive running of washington by big business is underpinned by low ethics and amoral behavior into a highly destructive death spiral. Until we surgically remove big business and it's vats of money from influencing government policy we are destined to crash and burn. But with the high rwa and sdo scaled personalities driving this train are removed we as a global population are at risk of economic and with it quality of life degradation of massive proportion. With big business, which is nothing more than a legal framework for the leadership few to steal shamelessly from the units of production call the workforce with nonliability and accountability, driving the events of the world - with no ethical or moral base - then we will see a financial armegedon in our lifetime...and...sooner rather than later
Corpania | 11.9.10 @ 4:29PM
1) Quoting from his review: "This increase in risk-taking in itself, however, could not have produced the crisis."
> Really? Trillions of dollars in derivatives couldn't have produced the bubble which, when it burst, produced the crisis? Ok.
2) Quoting from his review : "presumably on the ground that all government intervention in the market must be for the best".
> That is blatantly disingenuous strawman sophistry.
3) Quoting from his review :
"(the film) tells us that derivatives made markets unstable, but no evidence is offered for this proposition. The markets, particularly the housing market and the mortgage market, were unstable anyway, and for reasons that had nothing to do with derivatives."
> Trillions had nothing to do with it? Ok.
4) Quoting from his review :
"Assuming Mr. Ferguson is right to say of the issuers of mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), that "lenders didn't care if people could repay" their loans," that only puts (or ought to put) the inquiry back a stage. Why would a lender not care about the repayment of his money? He doesn't appear to know or care."
>Ahh but everyone who has read about this crisis knows (and the film does indeed mention) what happened. Here's an example: ACME LENDING lends money to JOHN DOE for his mortgage but then resells that loan along with many others to SMITH INVESTMENT BANK who "collateralizes" the loans into a financial security (called a CDO - Collateralized Debt Obligation). That bank then gets the ratings agencies to declare that CDO to be excellent -trustworthy - investment grade. But the ratings agencies have a clear conflict of interest (since they get paid directly by the investment banks and if they give low ratings they lose business because the banks go to the easy graders). The sucker pension funds trust the ratings agencies and buy the CDOs thinking they are safe investments. Meanwhile ACME is now entirely off the hook because they have no outstanding interest in (i.e. "no continuing bet on") the ability of JOHN DOE to repay the loan. So ACME keeps giving bad loans, booking its commissions, and inflating the bubble until in inevitably bursts leaving only the suckers who invested in the inflated CDOs decimated.
gk| 11.15.10 @ 10:52PM
"The loss in intellectual coherence and accuracy is made up for by the increased focus on the alleged villainy of deregulation." This could be rewritten to say " The loss in intellectual coherence and accuracy in my review of this movie is made up for by the increased focus on the totally irrelevant, simple minded need to squeeze the complexities of this movie (which are beyond my intellectual capacity to grasp) into a pointless, simplistic polemic about left/right political non thought.
corpania did all the readers of ferguson's tripe a great service: he/she intelligently restated what the movie CLEARLY shows (to those with an open and functioning brain) to anyone who has ACTUALLY seen the movie.
the marriage of big government and big money equals fascism. in italy, germany, and russia (and its satellite countries) we saw the financiers and industrialists amass enormous wealth while the unions were crushed and the standard of living for the majority diminished. does that picture look familiar today?
only now fascism doesn't dress in a black shirt, or brown shirt...it dresses in Armani
gk| 11.15.10 @ 10:56PM
oops. I said" Ferguson's tripe" I meant to say JAMES BOWMAN'S TRIPE!!
that's better
Glenn H| 11.26.10 @ 10:36AM
Saw the movie last night and then read this review. Syncs with other reading and NPR analysis. My suggestion, ditch the review and see the movie. I recommend the left form a new party called the "Outsiders" to offset the Tea Partiers. When the root cause of why the Tea Partiers are revolting (jobs, jobs jobs) finally sinks in they will join up and the people of this country might finally reclaim it from the fat cats who have milked the life blood out of our economy for too many years.
Brian K| 12.3.10 @ 1:11AM
Thanks, Corpania and gk. I thought maybe I was the one going mad, even though I saw the film only yesterday. In each place in Bowman's review where he determines that the film glosses over or completely ignores people, events, facts or evidence, I found the opposite to be true; the film explained each well and succinctly.
I agree that Bowman needlessly converts the discussion into an ideological left/right political debate. I would have actually been highly disappointed if the film had been only a scathing indictment of the right as Mr. Bowman seems to believe. In fact, I had that thought in mind going into the theater and I'm very pleased that it wasn't.
I can only assume we didn't see the same film.
specialefex| 12.4.10 @ 12:08AM
The movie seems to be hard hitting - while glossing over and nearly celebrating the IMF (albeit, there are a tremendous amount of hard hitting FACTS). One doesn't have to wonder too long as to why many Americans feel they're informed.....the question is by whom are they informed? The movie does a decent job of portraying what underlies the world system – but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I know people don't do it much anymore - but reading a book or two would be helpful. The real issues of our time cannot be reduced to an easily digested and regurgitated sound bite, but those who truly rule our everyday lives, love the fact that we think it can. Ferguson takes a good stab at dispelling this myth and countless others. However, you can only tell so much of the story in the time allotted. More info abounds – but you won’t find it on ANY cable news network.
Wendell Potter’s new book “Deadly Spin” & “Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein offer a few more details.
This from someone registered as a republican for 30+ years now. I’d change my affiliation … but there isn’t one that fits. When are the “Outsiders” meeting?
Juana Samayoa | 1.25.11 @ 11:23AM
Dear Editor,
Get yourself a new writer.
I couldn't stomach reading all of James Bowman's article because it was filled with so much superfluous crap and had so much double-speak that it made no sense at all.
It is truly unbelieveable to me that this man is a creditable writer. The crash of 2008 isn't at all hard to understand. It's really simple.
In the ole days, the poor used to rob banks. These crooks would get caught, the money often retrieved and off to jail they'd go.
These days, the banks rob the poor.
- AND! these f 'g-greedy-bastard-crooks are still in "business".
- AND! they've gotten PAID to be crooks
(aka "The Bailout")
- AND! have kept their multi-millions in loot
- AND! have given themselves immunity from any punishment because they've hired the sheriff (s) in town.
Mr. Bowman has the audacity to diss Fergurson's film by saying it's just so much "political left" hot air much like Michael Moore's films and for not delving into . . . .
". . .why the ratings services gave bogus AAA ratings" or
" . . .why lenders didn't care about getting their money back"
Excuse me??? It was crystal clear to me, as a viewer of "Inside Job", exactly why!! These crooks had placed their biggest futures bet of all . . .
"Want to bet we can get away with this AND make even more multi-millions?"
I guess Mr. Bowman's "scholary" mind reflects his penchant for being screwed royally over and over and over again ad nauseum.
Get yourself a new writer!
Juana ~
Certified Laughter Yoga Leader
mizjuana.com
resumes.actorsaccess.com/mizjuana
imdb.com/name/nm1721767
youtube.com/mizjuana
youtube.com/watch?v=ATzpeUnJR_0
Crack a smile. Laugh out loud.
Create the experience of a joyous moment now.
Juana ~
Thomas Russell| 2.26.11 @ 9:28AM
This review is a prime example of why we are where we are today. There will be no prosecutions until the public realizes that the two political parties have morphed into a machine fed by the financial system.
This distraction pits brother against brother and cleverly hides the true nature of our problem. Divide and conquer, bread and circuses. Until we wake up to that realization there will be no meaningful change. My only hope is for a peaceful transition to a "We the people" based system once again. This can include both the so called right and the left.
Vinnie| 2.27.11 @ 2:47PM
Mr. Bowman,
As to your excerpt:
"Apart from anything else, you've got to think that this is bad tactics, politically speaking. If everybody is guilty, then nobody is guilty. Much better to demonize only one or two or a handful of guys"
I think you may have missed the point. This movie is focused on an "Inside Job", sort of a long con on the American people, and it IS about a HANDFUL of guys, less than 0.5% of a country with 270 million people. The rest of us are pissed off at this and expect more from our leaders and CEOs!
This movie syncs up for the American people a larger systemic greed carried out by those we should otherwise be able to entrust. Mr Ferguson has done a public service with this film. Leaving any of his opinions aside, the facts of the "Inside Side" job as well as the arrogance of the purveyors is neatly bundled for the viewer.
I recommend this film to all, but especially for those that don't have the time to review the extensive amount of data that is compressed in the film.
Heretic666| 3.2.11 @ 12:59PM
What a load of crap...
"I recommend this film to all, but especially for those that don't have the time to review the extensive amount of data that is compressed in the film."
I recommend you jump off a cliff...
trust me...
theres good stuff at the bottom...
you'll be ok....
Vinnie | 3.4.11 @ 9:26PM
Typical polarizing remark from someone who either: 1) lives at one of the extremes of the political spectrum or 2) is some way benefiting from the systemic greed machine that is funded by the average american. You missed or ignored the point just like bowman; average americans get screwed by those in the know or those on the take. If you have the time to understand all the intricacies of the greed machine, more power to you; the average american puts more attention on paying their monthly bills and getting their kids in a position to succeed in life. As for the cliff...after you, as you are already much closer. Debate is one thing. Your post was meaningless.
Centrist Investor| 3.10.11 @ 9:50AM
I actually came out here hoping to find something anything that would blow a whole in the documentary - I'm invested and that documentary just pissed me off completely.
These idiots on wall street outsmart themselves by playing both ends against the middle and blew the middle to pieces pocketed the money and skipped town.
I was hoping that somewhere in Bowman's article there would be some fact or a series of facts that would calm me down - but it was just a stupid hit piece on the movie - wah, wah, they didn't blame Obama enough. Are you kidding Obama has all these charlatans working for him.
I'm in talks with my adviser right now today (3/11) in pulling all of my money out and going overseas where they put some regulations in place.
The deregulation ideology is off its rocker. Deregulating the overburdened fine...but zero oversight is wrong. And there is plenty of blame to go around. This documentary actually gave me a headache and made me sick to my stomach - literally.
You all can play blame games back and forth and rail against Third world - but not one of you not this article - not anything I have seen on the web or read in the papers has been able to say one salient thing about this documentary to show where it is wrong or counter the premise that our captains of industry didn't and are still not raping us coming and going.
Just because it doesn't comport with your ideology doesn't make it wrong. You dismiss it out of fear, or a missed placed allegiance at your own demise.
We could go through this thing again because NOTHING has changed. The politicians have only nibbled at the margins because Wall Street would blow them out of office with a money dump.
Regulations by the way create markets and jobs. Deregulation is just another word for lawlessness. Deregulating the overburdened is reasonable but treating it as a panacea or religion is foolish.
I'm invested I'm a centrist and Wall Street is supposed to have a fiduciary responsibility toward its clients. That alone should bring federal prosecution but the politicians are too worried about protecting their jobs.
We have to fix the undue influence first so the elected representatives no matter what side of the isle they are on can get back to governing from a practical, and sensible view point.
The guy with the gold makes the rules - that's not democracy and one helluva lousy way to "govern" such a large country.
Christopher Layson| 4.2.11 @ 6:26PM
Ad hominem, conservatively biased, opinionated, and devoid of any facts- and the argument here seems to be a rant made solely to poke at every little hole made by Charles Ferguson for failing to point to every single bad guy involved in the financial crisis.
When the next recession hits for the exact same reason as the one in 2007-2008, then will you be convinced we need sensible regulation? Probably not. But I suppose that's what Einstein meant when he said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again.
Mike Ligon| 6.24.11 @ 4:31PM
I am a former Marine with service in Vietnam and a retired Special Forces Captain who was trained in counterintelligence. I also retired from Customs & Border Protection after "10 Years On the Line" (read the book). I have extensive training from both American and Israeli experts in detecting deception during interviews and interrogations - of which I have conducted over 10,000. I took college courses in rhetoric and philosophy. I avoided watching the movie at first perceiving the previews to be a Michael Moore-ish piece of propaganda. After actually viewing the movie with that caveat in mind, I found it was just the opposite. As an interested graduate student in the late '70s I watched and read of the concerns regarding derivatives. I read of how it bankrupted Orange County, CA and how no one in America could explain how they functioned. I found "Inside Job" an exact replication of facts as I saw them in the last thirty plus years. On the contrary, my analysis of your critique is: 1. at no point do you ever state that any of the information in the movie was false, a lie or never occurred. (2) Your critique is rife with "glittering generalities" and rote political and personal accusations - you actually respond with a leftist tactic that I and the thinking American public abhors. Nowhere in your critique do you prove the facts in the movie are wrong. Those events did happen. The culprits are guilty (as are Barney Frank and George Soros of many, many more things). I'm a life-long conservative extremely concerned about the future of our country from both the liberal left and the exploitative manipulations of the Skull & Crossbones crowd. Having served in Vietnam, Central America and Mogadishu, and personally borne on my back the results of misguided executive decisions overseas and the loss of hard earned investment earnings I found both "Inside Job" and "No End In Sight" right on target. The status quo on both sides of the aisle just don't get how angry Middle America is at both of you.
Eirik| 7.3.11 @ 1:42PM
I agree with the rest of the people who found this article to be a load of crap. Here are 3 examples of the stupidity on display here.
"If financial institutions were able to shift their risks onto others, or onto the taxpayer, as they did, that cannot in itself have been the consequence of an act which, in theory, should have increased the risk only to themselves. The explanation that "deregulation" must be to blame makes no sense."
- The movie explains perfectly well why deregulation is to blame. Among other things, it allowed the banks to become too big to fail. Deregulation caused the crisis and thus the bailout.
Your argument seems to be that if the banks had gotten no government help and gone bankrupt, then they would have been detered from taking such big risks. Here's the problem with that argument. You can't argue in reversed time! The banks didn't know they were getting bailed out until after the crisis happened. It's like saying that a drunk driver who has survived a car crash drove drunk because he knew he was going to survive if he crashed.
In addition, so what if they had gone bankrupt. The bailout only happended because that was deemed to be the best choice for the economy as a whole. Going bankrupt wouldn't have hurt all the directors who could still have taken their money and walked away.
"It might interfere with his virtual perp walk of those distinguished economists and government officials who have ever been injudicious enough in the past to have spoken well of the economic benefits of deregulation and who are foolish enough in the present to have submitted themselves to the gotcha style of editing that Mr. Ferguson has apparently learned from Mr. Moore."
So because they said stupid things on camera, it must be Fergusons fault for tricking them into saying these things. This argument has no validity at all. You're not allowed to accuse a film maker of tricking people just because you don't like his results. Simply pathetic.
"Such questions are not gone into in any detail. The answers, one suspects, might cloud the politically motivated picture of increased regulation and higher taxes as the magic wand that would have made all our problems go away before we ever had them."
This is a theme throughout the article. Whenever the author find's something Ferguson didn't find important enough to include in the film, or didn't pursue far enough to his liking, he just assumes that it has to be because this would damn the leftist socialism narrative he likes to accuse Ferguson of having.
Usually when I read a rebuttle to a documentary, the author manages to bring up some error in the film that modifies my views on it. Not the case here. The entire time I was reading the article, whenever the article tried to point out a flaw of the film, it was perfectly clear that he was operating with flawed logic, hadn't understood the movie, or was just making empty claims.
Scott| 8.10.11 @ 4:09PM
I am late to this party, but feel I must point out with respect to Bowman's "virtual perp walk" remark that Ferguson does not criticize these academics for pointing out the economic benefits of deregulation; his criticism is that they engaged (and still engage) in a clear conflict of interest by taking money from the very institutions who most stand to profit from the deregulation the benfits of which these experts espoused. This is clear from the film; for Bowman to imply that Ferguson is indicting these people solely on the basis of their views, and nothing else, is completely disingenuous.
And insofar as "gotcha" tactics are concerned, if these professors thought their consulting arrangements with big banks were defensible, why didn't they defend those arrangements? Instead, they decline to discuss it, or even worse, like Glenn Hubbard, they start acting like a snotty 6-year old ("You have five minutes left now! What's that? You're asking me another tough question that might expose me as the fraud that I am? Well just for that you have three minutes left now!"), as if agreeing to be interviewed meant the inverviewer had no right to ask tough questions.
Paul M.| 9.1.11 @ 12:40PM
My wife and I watched "Inside Job" last night. I was interested to learn whether or not there were ideologues out there who would find fault with this documentary. My Bowman didn't let me down. It is both fascinating and disturbing to read mindless (in a literal sense) rants regarding left/right arguments. My guess is that the material in the documentary was too difficult for him to grasp - and the follow-on regarding "Hollywood liberals", "people to the right of Ferguson" etc was the best he could do.
What's pathetic is that nothing has changed on Wall Street. People get paid a whole lot more than I on Wall Street to destabilize the economy. But don't listen to me. I find truth in the documentary, therefore I must be one of those 'liberals' Bowman rails on against: (attended the U.S. Naval Academy, come from family of naval aviators - father received Navy Cross; nephew flew combat missions in Iraq (another screw-up in our minds). Married with 3 kids; Dont let the kids watch television; Wife cooks real food -vs. what most people eat these days). Yea, we're real left wingers looking forward to chairman Mao sorting it all out.
Several people above have summed it up well - big government meets big finance. It's not going to change unfortunately because there's an army of fools behind Bowman and an awful lot of filthy rich Wall Street types who will ensure we don't go back to having banks act like banks etc.
Eric| 9.21.11 @ 9:04AM
I find it interesting how people see what they want to see. I saw this movie as a serious case of political and financial denial. Everyone, DEM or GOP believed the gray train would last forever because they didn't understand the OTC black-box market. People who warned them or fought them like Brooksley Born under Clinton were pushed aside by the heavies like Greenspan. Greed not politics is what this movie is about. Everyone, DEMS, GOPs, and indpendants should be outraged that AIG was forced to pay 100 cents on the dollar by Sommers. People should be outraged that these people are still in politics, still banking millions, still funding 5 lobbyists to every 1 congressperson.
ssbonline | 10.14.11 @ 1:27PM
I am ---http://doispeak.blogspot.com/2011/10/inside-job-makes-me-mad.html
Max| 10.24.11 @ 7:27AM
James Bowman wrote: "The markets, particularly the housing market and the mortgage market, were unstable anyway, and for reasons that had nothing to do with derivatives"
If you do not know the issue you want to critize, then please write about something else.
So in your opinion, derivatives constructed from subprimeloans has nothing to do with 2008 Finacial crisis??
JT| 10.24.11 @ 11:10AM
Unethical behavior has nothing to do with right or left politics. But don't let that stop you from trying your darnedest to make your bitter political tirade pass as "critique."
As to your "duh! more taxpaying equals more tax breaks!" statement, it's more like "More money, more chances to get closer to a free ride." Trees, meet the forest.
"But what else would you expect from a movie narrated by little Matt Damon?"
--LOL, I see now. We're not reading an incisive critique of the documentary. We're reading the jealous sniping of a catty junior high kid. It's a little hard to take the rest of your piece seriously after you've made your cheap shots so obvious from the get-go.
Michael| 11.1.11 @ 1:36PM
After watching the movie I went searching online for critiques because I'm always interested in hearing opposing viewpoints. Sadly this review was not much more than a partisan hit job. Weak straw man arguments and a few counterpoints that were actually specifically addressed in the film. Did you even pay attention?
Then the "leftards" and "right wingnuts" start going at it in the comments. Don't you kids realize you haven't been invited to the party? The party is for the cool kids only. You think you have a say, influence, or a meaningful vote. But you don't. It's an illusion maintained by the cool kids.
Thankfully what follows in the comment thread are people that actually watched the movie and GET IT. People with life experience beyond posting on the Internet in righty/lefty battles. People that have woken up from the "American Dream" and can clearly see now that the game is rigged and it doesn't matter who sits in the White House. The oligarchs will continue to win.
Cleber| 12.15.11 @ 1:55PM
Interesting thread. No question that one can learn much more from the comments than the original "review".
The overwhelming (and disturbing) impression this documentary left on this viewer was the incredible and dangerous extent as to how much the entire political/financial system is intertwined.
When does "unethical" behavior become "corruption"? If one looks at it pragmatically, it would be when the law says it is. But then, we do have some laws that were, conveniently or otherwise, glossed over in this whole debacle. The emasculation of the SEC's enforcement division, which is well documented, should have been explored further in the film, in my view. All those fines imposed on so many companies (without any acceptance of wrong-doing), whilst at the same time giving the major "players" very generous bonuses and/or political appointments appears to be as incomprehensible as the fact that major finance academics were, and are, on the payroll of the very same companies.
As has been pointed out here, this is no righty/lefty "Michael Moorish" or "Tea Partyish" conspiracy. What is the most amazing is that so many supposedly educated people insist in continuing with the rhetoric and finger-pointing, seemingly oblivious to the incredible smell of a dead rat, as well as the smell of the still very-much-living ones that continue to run the "show".
Kyle Hentges| 12.30.11 @ 4:29AM
You (the reviewer) do not have the intellectual capacity for a documentary like this - at all - and it is embarrassingly obvious to anyone who managed to get through the entire textual abomination you call a critique, a review, an analysis, et al.
This sordid collection of connective words is enough to stain you for your entire career. Thankfully I read it online so I don't have to term it a waste of ink as well.
James Bowman.
Remember that name kiddies - it's going, uh, absolutely nowhere.
mioilman| 1.8.12 @ 10:17AM
The first time I watched this movie I felt vindicated in my decision to remove all my money from the stock market in the spring of 2010. The withdrawl coincided with my investment portfolio finally poking its head above water and a spider instinct that said that the historical trends enjoyed by the average investor were no longer applicable due to the altering of the most basic economic fundamentals.
Once the government starts picking winners and losers all bets are off. Damon's Trojan Horse isn't designed to impugn either left or right, it is constructed to attack capitalism and democracy. Taxing all the citizens of all their money won't cover the losses incurred by all the assorted government entities spread throughout our country.
When George Soros provides the money for Matt Damon to appear reasonable my spider sense engages again. The bottom line that is ignored remains,
It's the spending stupid. From top to bottom people are spending more than they earn. Until that is addressed bubbles will burst forever.
Shiva| 1.22.12 @ 4:19AM
Just curious how much you would have been paid. I don't know how come "spectator" has published an article written by a person which such a low intelligent and moral quotient. Are you by any chance one of the owners of this?
kim peterson| 2.27.12 @ 4:34PM
Strange article. Is it your m.o. to criticize intellectual discussion without fact, without substance, and without critical thinking? Spectator should critique your article with the same standards you used to critique "inside job." I guess you would not qualify to be the inside job on the "inside job."