This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 4, 2010 - As I watched "Inside Job," a meticulous, infuriating documentary about the 2008 financial crisis, the emotion I kept looking for was shame. But, as the familiar cast of characters paraded by -- Greenspan, Rubin, Bernacke, Summers, Paulson, Geithner, Fuld -- I looked in vain. These men, at least the ones who would sit down for an interview, indignantly denied they were to blame for the trillions in public and private dollars that roared down the drain when the mortgage bubble burst. Some of these men still hold powerful positions, others are still looked to for wise guidance. None of them appears to be ashamed.
The only conclusion one can draw after watching Charles Ferguson's horrifying dissection of the collapse, which had its beginnings in the relentless de-regulation of the financial industry under Presidents Reagan and Clinton, is that it's going to happen again, only next time it's going to be worse.
As he showed with his first feature-length documentary, "No End in Sight," about the war in Iraq, Ferguson is skilled at telling a difficult story, at digging the truth out of a babbling muck. He leads us carefully but with dramatic tension down a path that is strewn with concepts that are initially hard to grasp -- and once you have grasped them, hard to believe: With one hand, Goldman Sachs pushed on its customers hundreds of millions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities. With the other hand, it bet hundreds of millions of dollars that those same securities would fail.
Ferguson, an internet multi-millionaire with a doctorate from MIT, not only lays out the details of that story clearly, he gives it emotional power by pointing out who were the winners and losers in this rigged game of international finance. Investment bankers at firms like Goldman Sachs took home tens, and in some cases hundreds, of millions of dollars a year while depleting retirement funds for former schoolteachers whose average pension was about $19,000 a year.
The filmmaker managed to find a few knowledgeable people - academics unencumbered by lucrative connections with investment banks, regulatory officials who resigned after their repeated warnings were ignored -- who were outraged at what one describes as "a vast international Ponzi scheme." The most convincing (and entertaining) expert is Christine Lagarde, the French minister of finance. She recalls her shocked reaction to discovering without warning that one of America's largest international investment banks, with offices and employees all over Europe, had been declared bankrupt. In Europe, she explains, "bankrupt" actually means "bankrupt" - closed down. Everybody go home.
The second-most convincing (and entertaining) expert is Eliot Spitzer, former governor and attorney general of New York, who went after big Wall Street miscreants with ferocity until it was revealed in 2008 that he was listed as "Client-9" by a high-priced madam. Spitzer seems particularly knowledgeable on the subject of how much of the money that investment bankers weaseled from retired schoolteachers went to pay for hookers and cocaine for them and their important guests.
Those of us prone to paranoia may be at least a little suspicious that Spitzer and Spitzer alone was outed just as the financial bubble was preparing to burst.
Ferguson lays a good deal of the blame for the financial collapse on Republican politicians, particularly Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but he does not spare the Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton and his secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, formerly of Goldman Sachs. And he gives a low rating to the Obama administration, in part for the president's appointment as secretary of the treasury Timothy Geithner, who was head of the New York Federal Reserve when most of the big-bucks hanky panky was going on just down the street. He saw nothing.
Wall Street continues to wield enormous power in Washington and, according to Ferguson, the financial reforms the Obama administration has settled for don't amount to much. Meanwhile, financial institutions that received billions of dollars in public subsidies continue to pay bonuses in the millions to their top executives and traders, and the average pay at New York investment banks is $600,000 a year. Courtesy of the taxpayers.
No wonder America is angry. "Inside Job" shows us just who we should be angry at.
Opens Friday, Nov. 5
'Howl'
The new feature film "Howl" does a fine job of capturing the seductive blend of hipness and innocence that marked the Beat Generation, and James Franco is convincing as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, simultaneously shy and egotistical, naive and shrewd. But there is a problem with the film, one that damages it.
"Howl," the movie, has four parts, woven together. Three are successful:
- A recreation of the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the publisher of "Howl," Allen Ginsberg epic wail of a poem. The trial features Jon Hamm as the unflappable lawyer for the defense, David Straithairn as the sometimes baffled prosecutor and Bob Balaban as the judge, appropriately judicious.
- Dramatizations of Ginsberg reading "Howl" and discussing the poem and his ideas on life and art in rundown lofts and bare-brick cellar clubs.
-- Scenes of Ginsberg in sexually charged meetings with close fictional approximations of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky and others who, like Ginsberg, were "burning for the ancient heavenly connection."
The fourth part of the movie consists of the animated sections by Eric Drooker that attempt to illustrate the poem with such images as a man howling at the moon or scuttling along ghetto streets, "looking for an angry fix."
At one point in the film, a character says, wisely, that a good poet writes in the form of poetry because the things he wants to say could not be said with equal depth and power in any other form. The filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman should have paid heed to that statement -- the animated sequences, which keep veering into a bilious yellow-green, do nothing to help us understand the meaning of "Howl." Instead, they interfere with our appreciation of the poem, which represents itself so well that it has become one of the more important cultural artifacts of the mid-20th century.
To be fair, apparently the two directors were inspired to make a film about young Ginsberg and his famous poem by seeing some of Drooker's drawings on the subject. Perhaps the animated sequences could have been used as part of the opening and closing titles, but strewing them throughout an otherwise well-acted and well-directed dramatic film was a mistake.
Opens Friday Nov. 5