By Christopher Caldwell,
It was brought about by a flawed attempt to use credit markets to broaden access to housing.
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One of the most intriguing movies I’ve seen in a long time is The Big Short. It’s about the housing bubble and what we now call the Great Recession, based on Michael Lewis’s bestselling book “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.” The main characters are money managers who not only realized that the housing bubble was being supported by unsustainable subprime mortgages, but also found a way to make millions of dollars from the inevitable crash. Here are 10 things moviegoers need to know.
Lesson 1: There will always be bubbles. Lesson 2: Financial bubbles need not cause widespread economic harm. Lesson 3: A simple financial reform would have prevented the Great Recession. Lesson 4: The Big Short is mainly a movie about fraud. Lesson 5: It is also a movie about a massive failure of government. Lesson 6: But the movie ignores the role of government in contributing to the problem it exposes. Lesson 7: It was the private sector that came to the rescue. Lesson 8: Deregulation was not the cause of the problem. Lesson 9: The response of Congress to the financial crisis has apparently made things worse. Lesson 10: Instead of more regulations, banks should revert to being banks and government should perform its traditional function.
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