Inside Job (2010)

I wish I had kept track of all the key players in the financial meltdown who refused to be interviewed for this film and to own up to their greed, incompetence, conflicts of interest, and failures. On the other hand, I also have to admit that there are a handful of players who did agree to an interview and rightly regretted it. Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight about Iraq) wrote, directed, and produced this documentary film of the 2008 financial meltdown, and all but a few people look very bad indeed — the corrupt financial firms, regulators, politicians, and academic economists. There are a few heroes who maintained their integrity and pushed hard for reforms and regulations, but they were ignored, fired, or quit in frustration. Choose your metaphor, but the American financial system is a rigged game, an apple rotten to the core, a chicken coop guarded by the fox, or an inside job. Ferguson's main message is that the meltdown was no accident at all, but the consequence of untrammeled greed fueled by impunity. For book length treatments of the financial fiasco of 2008 see The Big Short by Michael Lewis or The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein.