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Superb documentary on the global financial crisis of 2008

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

This Thanksgiving, Americans can be thankful they do not live in a country whose larcenous financial sector has impoverished millions while its feckless government shovels more money at the culprits and its bought-off academics cheer.

Wait... that was the message last month for Canadian Thanksgiving.

As Charles Ferguson's superb documentary "Inside Job" makes clear, Americans can be thankful if they've still got their health, because their financial well-being has been stolen.

Now in limited release in New Jersey after openings in New York and Philadelphia, "Inside Job" is the year's most assured bit of film-making, also the most useful. Although essentially a movie of talking heads and lots of charts, "Inside Job" never looks or sounds dull.

Ferguson and co-writers Chad Beck and Adam Bolt provide an entertaining, informative and clear analysis of the kudzu-like growth of Wall Street since 1980, and the resultant erosion of the standard of living in the country as a whole.

Viewed from a glass tower, it's a success story. In a few decades, an industry that provided capital primarily for American industrial development and innovation found customers around the world, and sold them investment products increasingly disconnected from any real-world constraint.

Some years back, one of Ferguson's experts relates, a stock broker friend had to take a second job to support his family. Then, the industry was deregulated, and his friend was suddenly making millions.

On the other hand, while America has suffered financial shocks before, some deeper, the current one comes after a long decline in real average wages and a precipitous upward redistribution of wealth. For the first time, the rising generation of Americans has less buying power and less education than their parents.

Much of the power of "Inside Job" comes from its reach. It is not just a crusading documentarian making these points. An all-star line-up of the powerful and privileged make them for Ferguson and narrator Matt Damon.

Among those talking into Ferguson's camera are Lee Hsien Soong, prime minister of Singapore; Willem Buiter, chief economist for Citigroup; Christine Lagarde, France's minister of finance, economic affairs, industry and employment; Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve; financier George Soros; Andrew Sheng, chief advisor to the China Banking Regulatory Commissiom and an around-the-block line of politicians, bankers, professors, journalists and lobbyists.

In gaining this entrée, and knowing what questions to ask, Ferguson was able to draw on his own background. He came late to film-making after careers as a successful software entrepreneur, a consultant to high-tech companies and governments, and a think-tank fellow.

So while his off-screen voice is almost always polite, this is one documentary where the interviewer is well versed enough to interject the occasional, "that isn't true," or "surely, you're not serious" when some oily official spouts the pap that cable television laps up.

Some of those who fare the worst are Harvard and Columbia academics who provided the lack of brains behind recent American financial policies and applaud the lack of oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Former Bush chief economic advisor Glenn Hubbard failed upward to become dean of Columbia's business school. A highly compensated member of the MetLife board, Hubbard gets very touchy when Ferguson begins asking him about ethics and outside sources of income.

His Columbia colleague Frederic Mishkin provides the movie's hamana-hamana-hamana moment as he sweats through evasive answers about his own work. That includes a report lauding Iceland's economic deregulation shortly before its highly over-leveraged banks collapsed, the template for America's troubles. But at least the Iceland Chamber of Commerce still had $124,000 to pay Mishkin for his wildly inaccurate analysis.

Ferguson is no fonder of Democrats like permanently befuddled Obama economic advisor Larry Summers, an architect of deregulation and decline who personally intervened to prevent scrutiny of the financial derivatives market that would cause trillions of investment value to disappear.

"It's a Wall Street government," one insider says of the Obama Administration.

The three stooges of the financial apocalypse under Bush and Obama — Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernacke — also undergo scrutiny for the bungling and favoritism of their bailout efforts.

Among other things, they required that bailed out insurer American Investment Group make 100 percent payments to Paulson's Goldman, Sachs on the bad securities deal that helped bring the company near collapse. AIG also was precluded from suing Goldman, Sachs for fraud in the securities deals.

But Ferguson doesn't neglect the fallout elsewhere. He shows freighters sitting empty off Singapore. He talks to people in the idled garment shops in China, where 10 million people suddenly lost their jobs as American orders dried up. He even touches on the immediate closure of Lehman Brothers offices in London, because the American officials did not think to give allies warning that the rescue had failed.

"Inside Job" offers a lot more, and does so beautifully. After all, as the advertising campaign says, it's the film that cost over $20 trillion to make. That's your $20 trillion, since those who caused the loss are once again flying high, with benefit packages including coke and hookers.

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it