The theater lobby was largely empty, save for staff, and the only other moviegoers were exiting a romantic comedy. It was just the two of us watching the documentary about financial excess, which did not in fact nullify the necessity of the "gay seat" space partition. On the plus side, we could talk through the previews, but that benefit was immediately wiped out by the theater's reducing of the previews down to one film. (And good luck with that Mel Gibson beaver movie of yours, Jodi Foster). Apparently if you are coming to see a documentary, on a weeknight, in a huge theater that is half empty on its busiest days, and when it's after 9 P.M, and when the subject is the worst financial meltdown in modern history...well, those are just not conditions worthy of giving a bevy of previews and commercials to ease the viewer into their movie going experience. I felt a bit robbed, which thematically, may have fit with the film's intent.
Charles Ferguson directed and he was not coming at this with an entirely open mind. The overall blame for our 2008 meltdown was smelted down into a volcanic brew of Wall Street greed and hubris, combined with lack of federal oversight. The money from Wall Street, and the close proximity of all the players, filtering back and forth between academia, Wall Street and government, made it far too easy for people to avoid focusing on regulation and reform.
The film is an excellent hors d' oeuvre on the meltdown for those not closely paying attention to the events as they transpired. But in the process of trying to explain a complex subject, nuance is squashed, guilty parties are ignored, non-criminal behavior is implied to be criminal, and the euphoria of the herd is ignored. Most disasters are largely unpredictable because they are unthinkable. That fact is, this movie could have been made in 2007 or 2006 and been a prophecy, and not a self righteous retrospective.
I would have loved to see a greater focus on home buyers. The film leaves them largely untouched and implies that everyone who ended up overextended in a home they could not afford was in that position due to deceptive and predatory lenders. Mid film he trots out one such homeowner, a Hispanic woman with no command of English (literally, did not speak English) and whose husband ended up in a loan that somehow required $5000 on the first payment. Forgive me, but I was too distracted by the theoretical possibility that this woman was an illegal alien, than on the implied intent of showing the depths of mortgage originator deviousness. I only wish I had the good fortune of being defrauded out of a nice home in a country that offers a lifestyle ten times the one I was born to. Often, getting screwed in the United States still leaves you vastly better off than average achievement in your home backwater, economically speaking. She was not reflective of the true nature of home owner avarice that flooded the hearts of the average Joe and Jo-Ann across the nation.
And yet that's what we needed. A true accounting that showed how actual individuals on the buying end played into the circle of greed.
Bottom line, if any one group had shown some foresight and discipline, none of this would have happened. If all home buyers had said, "Oh no, I MUST put money down, and I won't pay over 25% of my income," then none of this would have happened. If Wall Street had said, "We won't use derivatives just to maximize bets on assets" none of this would have happened. If Republicans were not united behind the ideology of removing regulation, none of this would have happened... and so on. Every step of the way, and as long as appearances seemed okay, nobody stepped out of the trajectory and challenged the rising of the sun.
Then again, it's hard to do that when everyone is on board. It's hard to say the earth is round when everyone says it's flat. The movie seems to imply that some people (Wall Street) should have been more hyper aware and less greedy. Our position is that everyone (or nobody) should have been more aware and less greedy. It's human nature, herding, and if everyone was messing up, all should share in the blame.
We also felt a distinct disgust over the scapegoating of Goldman, Sachs, one of the few firms who decided to hedge their own risk. The film would have you think that Goldman was screwing innocents out of money by selling a product that the bank didn't believe in, which, under that theory, means that all those candy stores that were around when I was growing up that sold porn did so because the owners were pro-porn (as opposed to being merely pro-money).
In fact businesses sell stuff they don't believe in all the time. As do salesmen. Some might argue that Goldman was not just selling what it didn't believe in, but was betting against it. What might have been Goldman's covertly overt dishonesty is replicated throughout industry. Every time Microsoft comes out with some new tech standard that is not compatible with previously sold to you as awesome standard, well there you go.
Goldman didn't do anything that other firms didn't do, and further, they didn't do anything wrong. They were not selling porn to kids, or Windows 7 to businesses. They were selling product to equally savvy professional investors and speculators. GS could have been infinitely less astute and followed the path of Merrill Lynch--gorged on its own backlog of junk--straight into the gutter. But they stopped and protected their firm.
It's always easy to go after the sellers. We spend on trying to squash Mexican drug cartels. But what about the buyers? What about those who stepped up and said, 'I am going to ignore the existing voices who are saying housing is gonna crash, and I am gonna make me some money." If you had that itch and wanted it scratched, Goldman was going to help you do that, or, not do that.
Ultimately blame has to be placed on regulators. They allowed activity to take place that was foolish and harmful, but not illegal, which is why nobody is sitting in jail now; nobody will ever be sitting in jail. This dashes left wing hope and fantasy, but that's reality. There was no crime in terms of the buying and selling of derivatives. The overt crimes were at the lower mortgage initiation level, and those criminal coercive loans were far exceeded by badly structured legit mortgages.
It's up to Federal authorities, our elected officials, to realize that business unchecked, whether the financial industry or anyone else, will default toward convenience and profit. Republicans in their desire for small government have abandoned responsibility with the constant ideological push toward unfettered business. But the human capability to do business honestly or wisely is not consistently there and there will always be enough people willing to maximize profit no matter the cost. Or extract the profit before the costs hit home and you realize what has happened.
Critiques aside, someone should call a national movie night and make everyone watch this film. It dispenses with the conservative viewpoint entirely. We don't hear a whole lot about Fannie or Freddie being coddled by Democrats, or about the Community Reinvestment Act of a bazillion years ago being the cause of indiscriminate lending to shady "sub primes," and thankfully so. The basic Republican position is one that would lead one to assume that poor credit types (all those urban fake Americans, like Obama) were the beginning and end of it all. We say nonsense to that.
Sadly, on a cold day in winter, people prefer romantic comedy over a movie that just might help them understand the real world around them.
No comments:
Post a Comment