Spot Cat / 09 February 2025 / Categories: Movie and TV Shows, Movie

Margin Call

Movie on Amazon Prime released January 2012

There has been quite a bit of creative content around the housing bubble in the US that caused the collapse of Countrywide savings and loan and Fannie Mae in the summer of 2008 followed shortly there after with the collapse of investment banking firm Lehman Brothers, insurance giant AIG and Meryl Lynch swallowed up by Bank of America.

Interested in the subject and the cycle of build and collapse of the capitalist system we have created, from the 1920’s to 1937 to the more recent crash in 1987, when I first lost my shirt on the stock market to the dot com bubble of the late 1990’s early 2000.

It has happened quite a bit over time, over and over again, something made crystal clear in this brilliant made for TV movie starring so many big names, Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Paul Bethany, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons.

The story covers one day at one firm, and what happened when one risk management specialist developed a model to look at the banks exposure from current positions and discovered as one famous Citi Corp executive said, we dance until the music stops, but the music had already stopped figuratively speaking and global financial Armageddon was predicted to happen.

This movie looks at what you do and what one firm did do, effectively crashing the whole global market to save themselves and get out before everyone else.

“You gotta be smarter or you gotta be first” the news a cool calm

collected head of the firm says as he delivers the bad news to his board.

Written and directed by J.C. Chandon is his directorial debut his script follows the key people at an investment bank, allegedly based on Goldmans Sachs over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis.

Even though this film is 12 years old, it doesn’t feel dated at all. It shines a bright light on a system that has over time been shown to serve only the few not the many and begs the question for us all what exactly are we buying into.

Very clever stuff. I’d absolutely definitely watch this movie again and probably more than once more.

Gripping, shocking and from a world order standpoint point very very alarming.