The Big Short (movie)

[wisemaniac]

I've read the book & finally got around to seeing the movie last night. Even if you're only slightly familiar with how the industry works, it's a fairly entertaining movie. I really would encourage folks to read the book versus the movie but only because the book has more space & fewer limits on explaining some of the more intricate workings (or how effed up the industry was). Once the movie starts dipping into synthetic CDO's, I think that's where viewers will kind of get glossy eyed.

A word of warning - if you take a date who has a tendency to talk & ask questions during movies, you might want to reconsider. You absolutely have to pay attention to the dialogue or you'll end up a little frustrated. To tell the story, the movie has to constantly build on knowledge it gives along the way.

 

[herdfan06]

I just watched this last night, they did a great job explaining the various aspects of the industry.

 

[herdfan06]

It is now on Netflix.

 

[Rock98Dog]

I have a slight advantage in understanding it, but watched it with my daughter and she was able to keep up pretty well, only a few questions. The 4th wall breaks to help explain what was going on were very well used in the movie.

Of course, as a conservative, I would have liked for them to reference the true starting point (Clinton/Greenspan loosening Fannie loan purchase guidelines in order to increase the home ownership rate and increasing the percentage of LMI loans banks had to make in order to participate with Fannie, without which none of these other problems could have materialized), but other than that is was a great primer on how things went wrong.

 

[Rock98Dog]

If you are really interested in reading more on this, somebody (or bodies) has put in a ton of research on this Wiki link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_policies_and_the_subprime_mortgage_crisis

If you start reading a little down the page, under the heading Fannie and Freddie, you will get to see both sides of the argument as to whether or not they were chiefly to blame and it gives a great background from the inception of the Community Reinvestment Act up through the SEC indictments of top GSE management.