Inside Job

My dear spouse and I finally got out to the movies...did we choose something frothy and entertaining? No, not this time! We chose a flick that taught us an incredible history lesson...and made us wonder about folks in the business world.

The Inside Job is a two hour documentary that covers the financial dealings of AIG, stock brokerages, and other large companies that dealt in derivatives, subprime loans, and other questionable dealings that brought about the disasters of 2008. We learn first-hand about money-driven CEO's who would stop at nothing to earn a buck and whose underhanded business practices led to the housing market crash, unemployment, and global recession.

The most interesting parts of the story are the people involved. We learn about the Harvard professors who earned million dollar consulting fees as they played advisors to The White House and sold their expertise to the highest bidders. We learn about trusted names like Greenspan, Geitner, Paulson, and Bernanke, and see how our trust in power-mongering egomaniacs might have been badly placed.

One of the biggest shockers of the documentary lies in the fact that Obama has employed nearly every participant in the Great Meltdown. We discover that, as we remain shocked by the past exploits of our financial anti-heroes, these personalities are still in control.

Most of all, to this viewer, the documentary unfolds like a morality play, where the amoral MBA's control the pursestrings and the rest of the world looks on in dismay. Did the major players commit illegal acts? Hard to say. Where there was ponzi-scheming, indeed they did. Yet it seems only Madoff took the fall for that one. Was it beyond the law to receive massive corporate compensation from companies that had relied on government bailouts to avoid bankruptcy? Probably not. But it pushed the limits of decency.

This history lesson is worth seeing. Our daughter, whose interests lie not in finance but in philosophy, told us to run out and see this flick. She was right, because indeed the lessons lay more in the world of philosophy than than the world of currency.

The unemployed are suffering, those who lost their houses are suffering, and others who did not get so badly hit have the luxury of seeing this film and asking, "What is our world coming to?"