Banking Bad

When I can tear myself away from binge-watching Breaking Bad, I've been using Netflix to catch up on some interesting documentaries.  I started with Searching for Sugar Man, which tells the unlikely tale of Sixto Rodriguez, a long-forgotten American folkie who has always been massively popular in South Africa, but nowhere else.  Rodriguez is from Detroit, so Netflix then directed me towards Detropia, a gloomy but compelling analysis of the decline of the Motor City.

And from there I was directed to Inside Job, an Oscar-winning diatribe about the financial crisis, narrated by Matt Damon.  It's a few years old now -- Dominique Strauss-Kahn was still at the IMF when the film was made, rather than helping innumerable police forces with their inquiries, and Christine Lagarde was still in the French government, not at the IMF -- but it still packs a punch.  The narrative of how the crisis unfolded is still all too familiar, but the movie tells it clearly and concisely.  You won't get as deep an analysis as you would from, for example, Michael Lewis's The Big Short -- there are plenty of CDOs in Inside Job, but the film's makers seem to have decided that synthetic CDOs were maybe a step too far -- but there are no obvious blunders.

The film's director and writer, Charles Ferguson, uses a lot of talking heads to move the story along.  These are mostly people who are very happy to take the opportunity to castigate Wall Streeters: Eliot Spitzer features prominently, for example.  People who might have defended Wall Street or its regulators proved rather harder to nail down, and one of Ferguson's most effective techniques is to name and shame them:  "Alan Greenspan declined to be interviewed for this film";  "Lloyd Blankfein declined to be interviewed for this film" and so on, many times over.

It has to be said, though, that those who "declined to be interviewed" are unlikely to have many regrets, because most of those who did venture in front of the camera to defend the financial sector were roughed up very badly.  There's former Dallas Fed boss Frederic Mishkin, for example, who resigned from the Fed at the end of August 2008, just as the crisis was coming to a head, because "I had a textbook to revise"!  Mishkin comes across as shifty and, to be frank, a total lightweight*.  Or there's Glenn Hubbard of Columbia Business School (and the Council of Economic Advisers), who bristles at the tough questions and barks at Ferguson "You've got three minutes!  Give it your best shot!"

Much of this ground has been covered extensively by other writers and film makers.  The closest thing Ferguson has to an original contribution is his exposition of how academic economists have sold their souls to Wall Street in exchange for massive consulting fees.  In addition to the aforementioned Messrs Mishkin and Hubbard, Ferguson managed to inveigle Martin Feldstein in front of the camera, where he did himself very few favours.  Others named by Ferguson, including the biggest kahuna of all, Larry Summers, "declined to be interviewed".

Ferguson demonstrates very effectively that none of these folk, nor any of the bankers who paid (and continue to pay) big consulting fees for their services, feels any responsibility, let alone remorse, still less guilt, over the dire consequences of their actions.  By and large they're still on the job, and back to business as usual. Ferguson notes that the only person closely involved in the crisis to have been run out of town is Eliot Spitzer, and that was in connection with his personal life, rather than with the crisis as such.

With the Obama administration failing almost totally to deliver on its promises of regulatory reform, the world is relying on the promises of the bankers that they've learned their lessons, and won't do it again.  If you've watched as much Breaking Bad as I have, you'll have heard Walter White make the same kind of promise many times -- and you'll know how much you can believe it.

*I was tempted to say "Idiot", but I don't know how many readers I share with Dostoevsky.