Paul Weiss's Reviews > The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

The shocking criminal history of American capitalist greed and the sub-prime mortgage crisis that rocked the world's markets!

Make no mistake. THE BIG SHORT is a non-fiction piece of American history, it’s a story of American culture, it’s a complex reality tale of the structure of the US economy and its financial markets, it’s a shocking revelation of the negligence of US regulatory agencies and their lack of oversight of the markets for which they were responsible, but, more than anything else, THE BIG SHORT should be characterized as a true-crime dramatization of what was arguably the grandest of grand thefts in the history of the world!

The self-entitled attitudes of the moneyed class in the riotous aftermath of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage derivative market was simply appalling:

“The ability of Wall street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”

The powers that be could have stepped “in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers.”

“The Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understand of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.”

But as to laying of criminal charges and the prosecution of traders and corporations and their boards of directors?? Don’t be ridiculous. It didn’t happen then and, to this day, if hard right-wing Republican politicians continue to have their way in government thanks to millions of starry-eyed, gullible, misinformed voters who imagine themselves as the next possible billionaire on the block, it never will happen. Strict regulation of financial markets remains a pipe dream!

“… the unwillingness of the US government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system.”

My mind is still reeling as I try to absorb the reality of a US political, legislative, judicial and regulatory system that betrayed its citizenry by the refusal to recognize the criminality behind the virtually complete collapse of markets in 2008 and the necessity for steps to ensure it doesn't happen again!

Paul Weiss