The Big Short: Pitt, Bale, Carrell do the subprime crisis

khorum

Murder Apologist
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Turns out Adam McKay also co-wrote the screenplay too. Which is even more intriguing. The dude's only written for SNL and shit like Anchorman and Step Brothers. While the book definitely had some lulzy moments, they werent the sort of gags you'd expect out of the Ron Burgundy franchise creator.
 

Slaythe

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All Is Lost (with the old Brad Pitt
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) and A Most Violent Year from the same director, J. C. Chandor are also very good.
All Is Lost was fantastic.
 

khorum

Murder Apologist
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Nah, prolly closer to Wall Street 2 or Margin Call if you saw that. The book has quite a few moments of gallows humor but for the most part it's pretty sad.

Excellent round-table with the Author, cast and Adam McKay who was apparently a huge fan of the book and pushed for the movie. They got into a lot of the conditions that allowed the crisis to happen.



Best part: Ryan Gosling is a Ben Carson guy. Steve Carrell is a Trump guy haha.
 

Xarpolis

Life's a Dream
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This trailer rubbed me the right way. I've been waiting for this to come out. I'm absolutely going to see it in theaters.
 

Xarpolis

Life's a Dream
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I wasn't able to sleep last night, so I downloaded and watched this movie. Holy shit, it was great. Very depressing. It made me feel like everything is coming to an end, even though this happened 7 years ago, and we're still continuing down the same path as normal.
 

Adebisi

Clump of Cells
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Very good movie.

How the did all these bankers manage to stay out of jail? Before watching this I figured there were a few handfuls of key people who should have gone down, but apparently it was fucked on every level.

Love how bro-douche they made some of the minor characters.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Easy. Financial crimes are EXTREMELY hard to prove dude. Even low level embezzlement can take YEARS to detect. Then you have to prove that it happened.

There was just so much abstraction to all of it. The real estate guys slinging loans weren't thinking beyond their personal incentives (making $10k a deal, no matter who it went to). The CDO Fund "Managers" were paid 1% of the total CDO Fundvalue. So they didn't give two fucks about it what was in it. Just people on a macroeconomic scale not thinking beyond their noses.

If there is indeed some Snidley Whiplash twirling his fucking mustache he couldn't possibly have been stupid enough to write anything down. It will be decades before that fat lady ever sings. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi Scheme for over 25 years until he got caught and that was just a single hedge fund.
 

khorum

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CDOs weren't illegal. Securitization still isn't illegal.

As bad as the mortgage bubble was, the same mechanism is behind thesecuritization of student loans, with roughly the same toxic brew of Ratings-Agency shenanigans backed by a state fiduciary (Sallie Mae) combining to snowball a massive bubble. That article is by Mohamed el-Erian who used to run PIMCO, one of the world's largest private equity joints.

He's too nice to point out a major similarity with subprimes and for-profit colleges incentivized to milk public-aid backed student loans: just like handing out a 500k mortgage loan to a part-time stripper is probably unwise, handing out a 300k student loan to a feminist dance theory graduate is just as likely to produce a return.
 

Angelwatch

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We saw this today instead of Concussion (thankfully). It was really good. Steve Carell was awesome in it.

I was working in the banking sector at the time of the crash and those not fun times. I never did figure out how to get in on the big banker bonuses that they were, apparently, handing out left and right.
 

Eonan

Doer of Things
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Amazing movie, Carell stole the show (which was hard to do, since everyone else was pretty solid in it as well). I'll echo the sentiments from others here, when I was done with this movie I was both incredibly sad and interested in finding the nearest Morgan Stanley executive so I could repeatedly curbstomp him/her to death.
 

Xevy

Log Wizard
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Good movie. Expected more being from McKay and everyone's glowing reviews here. Definitely helped explain the entire housing bubble issue and what went wrong and why. Great acting performances by everyone, though. Way too fucking long.

7.5/10
 

Agraza

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Saw this the other day and was blown away, especially by Carell. This movie is hilarious and presents the events at a more understandable level. The Bueller moments are a great bit of both comedy and info.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
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CDOs weren't illegal. Securitization still isn't illegal.

As bad as the mortgage bubble was, the same mechanism is behind thesecuritization of student loans, with roughly the same toxic brew of Ratings-Agency shenanigans backed by a state fiduciary (Sallie Mae) combining to snowball a massive bubble. That article is by Mohamed el-Erian who used to run PIMCO, one of the world's largest private equity joints.

He's too nice to point out a major similarity with subprimes and for-profit colleges incentivized to milk public-aid backed student loans: just like handing out a 500k mortgage loan to a part-time stripper is probably unwise, handing out a 300k student loan to a feminist dance theory graduate is just as likely to produce a return.
And at least with a bad mortgage you can recuperate some of the money after foreclosing/short selling. Do they garnish wages on unpaid student loans?
 

Mist

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The real problem with a mortgage crash is that it directly makes everyone else's houses less valuable, because the banks now own tons of houses it can't get rid of at close to market rates. A student loancrashdoesn't have the same effect. In the case of student loans, the diploma bubble has already happened, devaluing a college education.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
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The subprime crash brought housing values back down to reality. It was a devaluing in the sense that properties were selling for way more than they should have been. Way more than they were actually worth. And the parallel to college education is an apt one. The price of a college education is beyond inflated, especially as you both pointed out, what good is a diploma if it's in either a saturated field (because so many more kids are being sold on a college education) or a made up field (gender studies).