I can’t help but think that Inside Job won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary on the basis that director Charles Ferguson should have won the Oscar three years prior for his debut No End in Sight, a documentary that takes an in depth look at the Bush Administration’s conduct prior to and during the Iraq occupation. At the same time, the Academy tends to shy away from endorsing politically-driven documentaries or overtly endorsing entertainers who do – for reference, see Michael Moore, whose eerie, eye-opening Bowling for Columbine deservedly snagged an Oscar, but whose acceptance speech blacklisted him from any future nominations.
In content, there is no problem with Inside Job, though it doesn’t offer any new information on the financial crisis that could not be found in various newspaper articles under a quick Google search. Like No End in Sight, this film, is haunting and disturbing in its depiction of evil corporate banks and their CEOs and sympathetic in its relegation of the middle class (if there truly is such a thing any longer) to duped consumers who are victims of “predatory lenders” who twist their black mustaches betwixt long-nailed fingers and plan ways to take over the world. As a cynic, I can’t earnestly defend bankers, CEOs, traders, or government officials who wield pejoratives like “socialism” and “communism” to avoid due criticism and scrutiny. However, I can’t fully sympathize with people who honestly believed they could afford a house that costs seven times their cost of living. So, even though Inside Job offers a fine view at the perfidious history of “massive private gains and public losses” through a “thirty-year period of deregulation” that ultimately led to a “global crisis” that “rendered 30 million people unemployed,” there is a lack of culpability placed on the middle class consumers who are searching for the American dream.
Perhaps the first thing that this documentary does very well is illustrate our general ignorance of financial matters within the country, positing that we, as tyro investors, rely too much on symbols and ratings like stars, number scales and variations of AAA (something that is rather relevant given the United States’ recent downgrading to AA+ after the debacle between the Republicans and Democrats over raising the debt ceiling). Essentially, these ratings (as suggested by Fergusson) are what allowed predatory lenders to take advantage of fledgling investors. At the same time, this also suggests that the consumers are immune from having to research their investments wisely to gauge whether or not their finances provide a backup plan. And in this sense, the banking industry and the people are quite a lot alike: neither foresaw a potential crash, and neither had a backup plan. The difference is that the Federal Government, under both Bush Jr. and Obama, were willing to bail out the banks.
Similar to the way in which customers blindly trusted others who “have a duty to serve our clients prices on transactions they ask us to show prices for,” bankers and the like trusted the companies they worked for without questioning their methods, despite a warning from Raghuram Rajan, a former IMF Chief Economist, that incentive structures generating huge cash bonuses but impose no penalties for later losses encourage bankers to take huge risks that might destroy their own firms.
What Inside Job also does rather well is examine the incestuous, concubinal relationship between Wall Street and government, looking at Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama through a bipartisan lens. None are indicted because of their party lines in that money seems unfazed by donkeys and elephants, something that is greatly apparent when the viewer understands that some of the main players like Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Mary Shapiro, and Larry Summers have had their hands in the historical architecture of deregulation as well as their presence on Wall Street and with the government.
In the end, Fergusson’s exploration of the Wall Street, government, and the economy is worth checking out, if only to remind one’s self of the dangers of ignorance and falling for the bait of the American Dream. I don’t mean to suggest that the “Dream” is impossible, but rather that it should arrive organically as opposed to spontaneously in the form of a belief that says “I’m an American, so I can afford whatever I want.” It seems curious that such a belief is effused, but perhaps watching CEOs and CFOs of JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch receive multi-million dollar bonuses after having aided the crash of financial institutions offers little in the way of demonstrating repercussions.
