Big Red Car here. Another crisp and beautiful day in paradise in the ATX. On Earth as it is in Texas, y’all! Oh, Hell, just move here.
So The Boss went to see The Big Short. He had been husbanding it for some time and last night finally went to see it.
Here is the report.
The Big Short is an excellent exposition of what went wrong in the housing scandal. It is OK to call it the “mousse in the hair investment banker housing financial derivatives scandal,” also.
It is a pretty damn good explanation and is based on Michael Lewis’ book of the same name. Go see it. The book is called: The Big Short, Inside the Doomsday Machine. [<<<<< That’s one of them there hyperlinks which takes y’all to Amazon where you can buy the book for your Kindle or buy it used. Used books have the same words as new books, just cheaper.]
It is a good read and you should probably read the book in conjunction with the movie.
There are several interesting things that you have to take away from the experience.
1. Nobody went to jail for train wrecking the US economy. Trillions of dollars of value were shitcanned. Lots of jobs were lost. Pension funds were decimated. People were devastated. Lots of fraud.
Nobody went to jail. You wonder who runs America? It’s Wall Street and, maybe, it’s the Goldman Sachs guys who run the Treasury.
Paulson, the Sec Treasury and former Goldman Sachs Chairman, was picking the winners and losers, not the President.
2. The products, the financial derivatives, the financial equivalent of C-4 were created by kids with mousse in their hair who were essentially unsupervised. Their companies did not supervise them. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission did not supervise them. The Federal Reserve did not object. Kids.
3. The lack of adult leadership and discipline was widespread, pervasive, and fraudulent. This was not a second dessert; this was eating an entire New York cheese cake and then asking for seconds. Sitting in your bed, unwashed, naked watching reruns. Drinking warm beer and puking. It was disgusting.
4. The rating agencies gave out their blessings with a “pay for play” sanctimoniousness that would embarrass Tijuana whores. They should all go to jail for what they did (the opinion of a 50-year old Impala convertible and not The Boss, who is afraid of getting sued even for a bit of tongue in cheekiness).
5. The movie did not fairly present Alan Greenspan’s warning — the US should not be trading in securities that require more than a single index card to explain or that cannot be understood by a truck driver. [He said something like that but actually did nothing to rein them in.]
Do not take the word of The Big Red Car. Go see it. Go see it with someone who knows something about finance. Do not eat before you go or you will throw up.
We did this to ourselves fueled by one unflattering characteristic of capitalism — GREED.
Nobody went to jail.
If you do not like the movie, send me your ticket stub and I will refund your ticket price. [Twenty dollars shipping and handling, please.] Go see The Big Short.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. Be good to yourself in 2016. Cause you deserve it.
