REVIEW: Inside Job

DAYLIGHT ROBBERY

Charles Ferguson, the technology entrepreneur-turned-filmmaker describes what the banking industry did to the US economy through their heedless greed as a 'heist' where the looters didn't walk in with guns, but were the guys running the show themselves. Inside Job suggests that the indiscriminate deregulation of the financial services and insurance industries and the unbriddled spread of high-risk transactions called derivatives, has looted America (and, by extension, the world) of trillions of dollars and increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the country like never before; worse, rather than being prosecuted for their role in this scam, they continue to hold key positions in the Obama administration!

Narrated by Matt Damon, Inside Job gives a far more rational and yet, angrier view than rabble rouser Michael Moore's Capitalism Inc. of the financial crisis that started unfolding in mid-2008 when large investment banks like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and the insurance giant AIG were on the brink of collapse, as was Citi Bank, before the US government (comprising among others, the former head of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, the man who served as Treasury Secretary in the Bush government and played a significant role in the deregulation process) offered them unprecedented bailout packages.

It isn't as though stable-minded economists and market watchers hadn't predicted the crash. Raghuram Rajan, the Chief Economist at the IMF presented a paper as far back as 2005 predicting a 'catastrophic meltdown' which was merely mocked at by the US administration. Everyone was too busy making too much money (often at the cost of not just the public, but of their own institutions too) to take notice. So much so, banks like Goldman Sachs were actually betting against the very positions they were selling to their clients!

Ferguson pins the blame in equal measure on politicians and bankers. But not far behind are high-profile academics from prestigious schools such as Harvard, Columbia and Berkeley, serving the cause by writing reports and presenting papers suited to keep the climate of mindless optimism going. That they also happened to serve as consultants to some of these very banks is a fact the director points out emphatically as the pitch of the narrative gets more and more acerbic. 

At a purely cinematic level, Inside Job is a study in controlled self-confidence. It starts off in serene Iceland, which was the first country outside of the US to feel the dramatic effects of the sub-prime crisis. It then glides calmly over the New York skyline and often takes the ariel route to survey the small square-mile of Manhattan where the perpetrators of this scam did their business. As the questions get more and more uncomfortable, we see bureaucrats, lobbyists and academics first squirming uncomfortably, then losing their temper on camera! Each of the major players involved were approached for interviews by Ferguson and the film records that they declined to speak to him.

But those on record are significant enough to create a major impact -- the head of the IMF, the Finance Minister of France, the Prime Minister of Singapore and a host of writers, journalists, economists, traders and analysts, many of them whistleblowers whose warnings those in power chose to ignore over and over again. 

Completing the picture of decadence and callousness, is a Wall Street madam who speaks on camera about her high-profile clients who billed their corporate accounts to procure prostitutes and cocaine. This woman claims 50% of her high-end clients were from the financial services industry. 

That statistic says it all.