Analytical Commentary: The Big Short

The Big Short - Analytical Commentary The Big Short, a film centering around the 2007-08 financial crisis and its causes, does an effective job of depicting corporate greed in capitalist society. Through a clever stylistic choice of having well-known celebrities explain complex wall-street jargon through intelligible metaphors - the film succeeds in explaining the build up towards the financial crash. It also shows that not everyone was blindsided by the housing bubble, and that a handful of economists not only successfully predicted it, but with great foresight were able to short it, betting against the housing market - in order to make a massive profit. Despite the film doing an excellent job of explaining both the gross negligence of the
Financial institutions are not broken up and still hold gross amounts of GDP that could threaten the global economy again. More regulations should be passed to force banks to keep even more capital on hand, “too big to fail” banks that have been curbed but not broken up, should be broken up in order to ensure stability within the industry and the economy. The film presents an accurate depiction of the history behind the crash, it’s causes and effects, but it’s oversimplification of the government’s response to the crisis is fairly inaccurate. Although one could argue in favor of the original quote by Vennet, that “big reform” was killed post-2008 - that is based entirely on differing opinions on what classifies as - “big reform.” The films political agenda is most clear here, and while not an incorrect agenda, it’s transparency arguably makes viewers question it’s legitimacy in the concluding scenes. The film aims and definitely succeeds in making the audience justifiably angry - but as a progressive myself in favor of further Wall Street regulations, its omission of the progress that has already been made seems to dilute it’s