Inside Job

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Money & Finance

As gripping as any thriller, Inside Job tells us everything we wanted to know about the global financial crisis but didn’t know the right questions to ask. Informative, intriguing, funny in an ironic way with blatantly terrifying implications, filmmaker Charles Ferguson has constructed a five-part film which describes, explains and analyses what, why and how it happened (Source: Keller 2010, np link).

The film opens in Iceland, an idyllic stable democracy which is largely self sufficient. However, once the cold arm of corporate greed reaches in, the horizon soon darkens. Deregulated provision of natural resources and financial services resulted in a country with a GDB of $13bn racking up bank losses of $100bn. Iceland was a blip on the radar, but still an early sign of looming disaster. The film then goes on to effectively simplify the over-arching causes of the disaster; pointing largely towards the lack of regulation of the markets and increasingly complex financial instruments being used to speculate (gamble) on anything from oil prices to the weather. The completely unregulated derivatives market is worth $50 trillion, attempts to control the market were dismissed by government officials who received $5bn political contributions from Wall Street between 1998 and 2008. Collateralised debt obligations were used to lump in all kinds of debt (from mortgages and credit card debt to student loans) into one easy to manage unit which could be sold. Subprime mortgages were the favoured component of CDO given the higher interest rate the loans attracted. And The Film That Cost Over $20,000,000,000,000 To Make (Source: Chris 2011, np link).

[It’s] a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma. The betrayal of public trust and collective values that Mr Ferguson chronicles (Source: National Public Radio 2010, np link).

Matt Damon provides a recognisable voice as narrator. Damon smoothly breaks down how the 2007-8 financial crisis was created by a blitz of deregulation, fraud and predatory loans. The claims from Wall Street that their dealings are too complex for us to bother about are made starkly worthless by these fluid, concise descriptions. … Despite the rumours some did go to jail, Matt Damon explains that the Wall Street top brass “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact” (Source: Senevirtne 2020, np link).

I started thinking about it, actually, fairly early on because … uhh, in a way indirectly related to my earlier academic and policy career … I know several of the people who were among the earliest to warn about the coming of this crisis, umm Nouriel Roubini and Charles Morris, who are two of the people who appear in the film (Source: Ferguson in Commonwealth Club of California 2011, np link).

It was after the failure of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in mid-September 2008 that I decided I really had to make this film, and I approached Sony pictures Classic who were immediately very supportive (Source: Ferguson 2011, np link).

For past 2 years I have immersed myself in those worlds in order to make a film, Inside Job, that takes a sweeping look at the financial crisis (Source: Ferguson 2010, np link).

Charlie Rose: [to Charles Ferguson]: “Could we please turn this off” Did you find that often when you were moving in to make what you thought was a point about the contradictions, [your interviewees] said “Wait this is not what I bargained for?” Ferguson: Yes that happened quite a number of times. We decided – I decided it – that it would be overkill to show them all in the film. So, in fact, David McCormack is the only one where we show him saying that. … Several people said, when they saw an ealier cut of the film, you know, “You can, you can’t do this! Yes, it’s all true. But that’s exactly the point. The film, and the reaction to the film, is going to become about your destruction of these individual human beings and that’s not what your film is primarily about at all. Rose: What’s your film about? Ferguson: The film is about the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry … and the consequences of that systemic corruption (Source: tp1murray 2011, np link).

[This] is a maddening film that plays like an economics lecture where the professor continuously runs his fingernails down the blackboard … It is supposed to act as a microcosm of our current predicament. We then learn how banks were deregulated in the 80s following 40 years of growth and prosperity. Greed fuelled decisions for banks to take risky investments which led to short term growth but eventually the recession, bailouts, and the housing crises. We learn how this new system was perpetuated and even how many of the people responsible haven’t been tried for crimes and how some are even still making decisions or holding economic positions (Source: Kaiser 2011, np link).

[In] the little 12-minute “The making of Inside Job” mini-movie tucked in the extras folder of the [film’s Blu-ray] disc … I discovered that Ferguson is FAR from being a bomb-thrower.  In fact, his attitude seems that of a rich man (he sold his software company Vermeer for $133 million in 1996) who is sadly disappointed by the ethical failings of some in the financial services business.  (He might have even lost a large chunk of his nest egg and is pissed by the thieves who stole it.)  His film does not examine the systemic failings of the institutions of finance – rather it looks for (and finds) bad guys (Source: Larson & Wikrent 2011, np link).

I don’t think I’m an anti-capitalist or anti-business at all. I am however against large-scale criminality and if being against gigantic frauds makes me left wing, then so be it (Source: Ferguson in Lattman 2010, np link).

Almost two hours sitting in front of a bunch of economists talking about credit derivatives doesn’t sound like a great night out, but, somehow, Charles Ferguson’s documentary indictment of the financial-economic-political complex manages to carry you though it. Yet the most pathetic and fascinating individuals in this film are the economists, whose uncomfortable links with private enterprise and the banks are excruciatingly dragged out of them. Fingering them is a novelty, and they come off badly (Source: O’Grady 2011, np link).

Columbia Business School, which came in for a critical drubbing by the Academy Award-winning documentary” Inside Job”, has approved more stringent rules for disclosing potential conflicts of interest among faculty. The changes, approved last week by B-school professors, come after the provocative documentary brought embarrassing attention to academics who profit from unreported consulting and directorship deals with companies and organizations and then weigh in as “objective” observers on key policy issues in economics and financial regulation. The documentary was especially discomforting to Columbia Business School Dean R. Glenn Hubbard and Columbia B-school professor Frederic S. Mishkin. Under Columbia’s new policy, Business School professors will be required to publicly disclose all outside activities – including consulting – that create or appear to create conflicts of interest. The new policy requires B-school professors to publish up-to-date curricula vitae, including a section on outside activities, on their Columbia webpages. They will be mandated to list all outside organizations to which they have provided paid or unpaid services during the past five years, including but not limited to consulting work, research, membership on a company’s board, and expert witness testimony. They will also have to describe the nature of those services (Source: Byrne 2011, np link).

One thing Inside Job does is to make financial innovation discussable within the public space. In other words, it makes finance arguable and debatable. But there has been a response, in a good direction. A number of universities, in response to the film, held public meetings and conferences of various kinds about the accountability of economists, a couple of which I attended ‐ there was one at Columbia University, another one at Stanford University. And a number of universities tightened their conflict of interest regulations and disclosure requirements… there is an increased awareness among students and the media. And I have noticed recently a different attitude towards academics in several articles in The New York Times and other prominent media. It is not taken for granted that they are objective. And sometimes conflicts of interest are actually pointed out in the article. That is a big step forward. I am actually very proud of what the film has done in this regard (Source: Ferguson & Muniesa 2012, p.27 link).

Director Charles Ferguson’s now-famous acceptance speech at the Oscars … lamented that so far no one has gone to jail for crimes to committed during the financial crisis of 2008 (Source: Lashinsky 2011, np link).

What I can’t understand is why we haven’t had a revolution yet (Source: nyshrink 2010 link).