Film REVIEW: Inside Job

Only one person used his Oscars victory speech to plead for people to be jailed: Charles Ferguson, director of this eye-opening dissection of the causes of the economic crisis. Ferguson is furious that despite the enormous abuses that brought the world to the brink of financial meltdown, no financial executive has been imprisoned for their part. After watching his documentary, you probably will be too.

Debbie Stowe

Bankers, brokers, politicians, authors, journalists and academics – as well as a brothel madam and a therapist – help piece together the calamitous events that sent shockwaves from the trading floor in New York to the factory floor in Beijing. Deregulation allowed lenders to play fast and loose with their depositors’ savings, ridiculous bonuses incentivized reckless gambling, while increasingly opaque financial instruments put so many middlemen between lender and borrower that banks raced to snap up the riskiest customers. Not a recipe for stability.

The documentary does a good job of explaining all the technical chicanery of the bankers and traders – which we used to think was so impenetrable because they were really clever people but now know was simply a demented house of cards waiting to collapse. Ferguson astutely got Matt Damon – one of Hollywood’s most trusted actors – to narrate. And the story contains as much corruption and subterfuge as any Jason Bourne thriller.

Tales of financial professionals’ cocaine, strippers and conspicuous consumption will surprise few today. But Inside Job also reveals the more insidious and incestuous side of the scene, how Wall Street’s grasping tentacles snake into the White House, as well as the top US universities.

Dissenting voices – the economists, writers and politicians who spotted the madness for what it was – were ignored. And, most worryingly of all, they still are: a US administration packed with perpetrators shows little appetite for real reform, so the whole thing could happen again. Though the film ends with a rather cheesy piece of patriotism – a rare wrong note – it offers few answers. And though it’s fun watching the humbled masters of the universe squirm under questioning (even though we know they’re going back to yachts and penthouses), more sobering are the images of the deserted factories, abandoned homes and tent villages that speak of the enormous social cost of the greed, hubris and grubbiness that make documentaries like this so important.

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