Lindsey Lowson / 30 December 2024 / Categories: Movie and TV Shows, Movie

THE BIG SHORT

My top 20 all time favourite movies

There are good movies, the one’s you watch, you remember you liked but can’t really remember the plot or the characters and then there are movies like The Big Short; you remember finding Christian Bale playing investor Michael Burry, a highly memorable weirdo intellectual fund manager with a glass eye strangely fascinating, you’ve met people like him before.

The Big Short is one of the those films that pulls you in. It’s about the financial crash of 2008 and covers a chilling true story about the greatest banking fraud in US history and tells the story through incredible real life characters, a group of people, intertwined yet disconnected.

It is an absolutely brilliantly executed script from Charles Randolph and Adam McKay based on the book by Michael Lewis.

Critics called the film slick and funny, both of which are true but also brilliant and fascinating and when you think about what happened more deeply, quite disturbing and scary.

The big short gives us a look inside the financial institutions most of us know nothing about and a closer look at the “instruments” traded (they call them this because they are made up”)

The film cuts away to sexy scenes of gorgeous girls at the blackjack table or sipping champagne in the tub to give simple explanations to the trading garb and they are simple so anyone can follow what actually happened without passing your series 7 exam, the Stock Exchange gate keeper qualification for every trader on Wall Street.

Alongside Bale the movie stars Steve Carell as Mark Baum a super neurotic senior broker, Ryan Gosling as a banker at Deutche Bank, the client creating the instruments, and Brad Pitt as an eco warrior and anti establishment banking expert who helps two up and coming investors leverage the biggest short in history which basically means betting against the whole market, in this case it was the US housing market which led to the subsequent collapse of Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers' involvement in the subprime mortgage market was a major factor in its collapse.

If you don’t really understand the stock market globally and want to learn more about how the banks were responsible for selling and reselling supposedly low risk mortgages all bundled together but not correctly rated by the credit agencies like Dunn and Bradstreet resulting in billions of dollars of losses, this movie explains everything. Howie Hubler lost 9 billion dollars in one trade, Morgan Stanley lost 9 billion which at the time was the fourth largest trading loss ever, and the CDO manager at Merrill Wing Chao lost 300 million dollars.

The scariest part of all is after it happened nothing really changed, sub prime mortgages are still sold, packaged in CDOs by the banks and traded.

The definition of insanity to repeat the same behaviour and expect a different result only it’s predicted the next time it won’t just be one bank that collapses.

When you watch this movies be prepared for 2 hours to go by in a split.