Movie: Inside Job

I used to read the Wall Street Journal which was handed out for free in business school school. This was ten years back. The world was just beginning to recover from the Asian Financial Crisis and the mood was upbeat.

From this newspaper I first began to read of financial jargon like "hedge funds" and names like "Alan Greenspan", "Warren Buffet", "Berkshire Hathaway", "George Soros", "Merril Lynch", "Andersen Consulting", "Exxon-Mobil", "AOL" and "Enron".

Alan Greenspan was the center of attraction in those days. The whole US financial system seemed to ride on his official announcements. The stock market paused before he would make one...and then react immediately after. Don't ask me what he said in those announcements because I read them over and over again and I could not understand a word! 

Fast forward to 2011. The GFC (Global Financial Crisis) happened in September 2008. Major financial houses became bankrupt(including giants previously thought to be unsinkable) and people had no money to pay for their mortgages. What happened? Well I don't think I'm the best person to explain it.

But I did find a movie that gave me a rundown of all that happened from the late 90's to 2008. I heard about INSIDE JOB during the 2011 Academy Awards. I saw the producers accept the award (by the way, one of them is a Filipina) and they said that not one person has gone to jail for the GFC. 

I saw the movie a few weeks ago and I would like to recommend it to you. You can download it off Amazon. I won't attempt to make a review of the movie except to say that the presentation was crisp and not once did I get bored (which is rare for a movie about banking and finance). The movie will show you the role players in this whole mess. I was surprised as some of them were people expected to protect the interests of the public.

Go see the movie and tell me what you think.