Blog 9. Themed Post: a Book or Movie Review

Review: Inside Job

Last weekend I finally watched the film: Inside Job, by Charles Ferguson. It was an excellent documentary for people who don’t want to understand the financial crisis but for those of us who enjoy the "Michael Moore"-type of films. I say this because the movie has an angry tone towards American Financial system and consequent meltdown in 2007.

It depicts the late-twentieth-century American economic policy in an effort to reveal and unfold the roots of the recent crisis – which is attributed to alliance between politics, academics and big business. The film received an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and is both a careful exposition of the causes and effects of the crisis that shook the world in September 2008, when 20 trillion dollars were lost.

The movie is a documentary narrated by Matt Damon who seems to be the journalist behind the extensive interviews, however, the piece bases all its research on Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short,”. The documentary looks at all the people who made mistakes and asks how they possibly could have overlooked a crisis so obvious

There are many facts and areas that the movie analyses, ranging from the impact of America’s influence in Iceland’s economy, to the changes suffered in American and World society after the break.

The director’s style is to allow his interviewees do the talking, with a sober voiceover from Matt Damon, but later in the movie, the strategy gets really aggressive, and even there’s a touch of Michael Moore in the later scenes, when he (Damon) insists on hard questioning an economic adviser under Bush, who is currently the Dean of the Columbia University Business School, on the cosy relationship between academia and government.

Particularly, it’s parts four and five of the film (“Accountability” and “Where are we now?”) that are the most devastating. By exposing debatable facts and figures, Ferguson makes it clear that the individual men and women behind the decisions that caused the crisis not only benefited from what happened, but are still running the financial services sector; also, the director briefly comments on the more sordid side of the crisis – the cocaine and prostitutes paid for with money from the people because bankers competed for bigger deals and better bonuses. He also cross examines the academic world– exposing the role that business school economists played in creating the chaos, by giving arguments that supported the financial bubble.

It’s an insightful and very eloquent story of the worst kind of greed, and with the deliberate lack of a resolution, the film – which requires some concentration – will almost certainly leave you feeling that heads must roll.