My first unaccompanied car-purchase, when I was older than
I would now care to admit, was of a blue, six-year-old Renault 4
and it cost me, if I remember rightly, £250 — which at the time
was worth about $650. I was a penurious American student in
England, and that represented a considerable part of the money I
had available to support me for the remaining year of my course
there and so was something of an extravagance. But I was determined
to use the “long vac” for an extended camping trip through the land
of the Renault’s manufacture and thought that it would be a good
idea for my prospective means of conveyance to feel at home there.
I don’t remember what I eventually discovered was wrong with it,
but I do remember that it cost as much to fix as the car itself had
cost me. I also remember the look on the face of the seller when he
saw the cashier’s check that I had just presented him with. He
couldn’t believe his luck.
In that moment — too late! too late! — I knew already
that I had been sold a pup, though I wouldn’t admit it to myself
until the fact became undeniable. Fortunately, the car got me
around France and back to England again before its mechanical
problems required immediate attention. Doubtless this was a good
learning experience for me, and not only because I didn’t make the
same mistake again. I learned, for instance, where the ancient
maxim, caveat emptor, comes from and why it is so crucial
to the economic progress of mankind. The honorable thing would of
course have been for the seller to tell me that there was something
wrong with the car, but then it would not have been salable. In
these circumstances, a man is a fool to expect honorable behavior
from others, even though what that man did was no less
dishonorable. Trust but verify, as Ronald Reagan used to say.
People forget that he was making a joke.
J.C. Chandor, the writer-director of Margin Call,
though still under 40, looks to be a good bit older than I was when
I bought that car, but he still thinks it scandalous when someone
sells something he knows is less valuable than he has represented
it as being. So it would be in a perfect world, though it is pretty
much the ordinary way of the world as we know it. His fictional
company in Margin Call is supposedly based on Lehman
Brothers, but this company has, as Lehman Brothers did not, an
opportunity for one last glorious trading day in which it disposes
of all its toxic assets to suckers around the world before they
realize what the company’s clever young number-crunchers have
discovered, namely that everything it has to sell is or soon will
be without value. That, on the face of it, seems pretty unlikely,
as does the fact that it takes some nerd at a computer and far down
in the company hierarchy to spot a mathematical miscalculation that
has made it or soon will make it bankrupt.
In reality, that’s not how things happen. You don’t
discover one afternoon from some mathematical wizard’s taking a
look at your balance sheet that the assets you hold will be
worthless in 24 hours. If they’re worthless now, they were
worthless when you bought them, and if you didn’t know it you
should have known it. More importantly, if you didn’t know it,
someone else must have known it — most likely whoever sold them to
you. For those who don’t know, they don’t know not because of
mathematical legerdemain but because of the same kind of
self-deception I was guilty of when I bought that car — around
about the time, I imagine, that Mr. Chandor was born. It’s an old
story and one in which the guilty parties are many. But, from
Hollywood’s point of view, that’s the problem. Guilt is too widely
diffused to suit the purposes of Mr. Chandor who, like many of the
demonstrators at the Occupy Wall Street manifestations and their
sympathizers in the media, is on the hunt for the real
villains, those who can be made to bear the burden of guilt for the
rest of the one percent — and perhaps for the 99 percent who rode
the bubble as well.
Mr. Chandor’s chosen scapegoat is John Tuld (Jeremy
Irons), the similarity of whose name to that of Lehman’s Dick Fuld
is doubtless coincidental. He it is who, on the news that the
assets have been suddenly discovered to be worthless, gives the
order to sell them anyway with the sort of aristocratic insouciance
in which Mr. Irons has long been a specialist. Of course, they must
be sold at once and at whatever discount is necessary to get them
sold, and both the more and less sympathetic underlings to Mr. Tuld
all meekly hop to it and sell them. Their willingness to go along
with the imposture so as to salvage something from the wreck of
their livelihood means that they must be supposed to share in his
guilt, but I think the idea is to give a boost to the essentially
political one that they do so because it is really “the
(capitalist) system” which is to blame. If you don’t like to hear
that, you can tell yourself that it is only a movie since,
unfortunately, it is.
The reviewer for the New York Times
wrote that this picture “does a great deal to
humanize the authors — and beneficiaries — of the 2008 financial
crisis.” But its characters and those they are presumably based on
were neither authors nor beneficiaries. It’s hard to think of
anyone who was a beneficiary of the crisis, apart from Barack Obama
whose election that year it made all but certain. But as for
authorship, the crisis was a result of a silent conspiracy of
government, bankers, and homeowners, both existing and prospective,
all of whom were willing to ignore the risks of reducing or
eliminating old-fashioned lending standards for the sake of the
money to be made or the political benefits to be reaped, for a
while, from doing so. But the self-deception of the greedy is too
old a story to suit Hollywood for whom, as for the greedy
profiteers themselves, there is a powerful incentive to believe
that “this time it’s different.”
