The Big Short - A farce explained

"[They] had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now they saw there was not." Michael Lewis

The movie is good, well acted and very good editing and directing in my humble opinion. Entertaining and also educational at some level, a fact that is not to be taken for granted since is not a normal characteristic of hollywood movies.



In relation to our class materials I think it helped me understand some of Appadurai's concepts and descriptions regarding the financial market type of individual and specially the world where they move and interact, for example the high risk high reward way of doing business or the  unreasonable faith that brokers put in models and other economic tools, even in the face of facts that contradict them their believes didn't change. (As the real world guy that was in the debate at the end, even with the market collapsing he was still defending it.)

I think is worth mentioning that the during the movie there are only two "guilty" characters shown. One woman, from the rating agency, and one man, a colored man, specifically the man that is a derivative bond administrator. I would have liked to see the real heads of the collapse shown in the movie, even through a caption like the ones that explained the complicated terms and moments in the movie. Not showing them, in my opinion, reinforces the notion that it was the impersonal financial market that collapsed, a notion that liberates individuals from the responsibility they had in the mentioned collapse; it becomes an issue of legitimacy and symbolic significance. Who is shown? and why were the shown chosen to be shown?

The other point I would like to touch and that is the one that the epigraph is about and is the one that connects to readings in class is the farce that wall street and the "economists" put on stage everyday, so much so that even they believe is real. On the other hand that farce is so real that it affected millions of people who lost their homes and/or their jobs.