Movie Review: Too Big to Fail

It's no secret I have revulsion of the rich, occasionally finding myself nodding my head to guys like Lenin. Some days it disturbs me how much in my head I find myself using words and phrases like proletariat, re-distribution of capital, means of production and bourgeois.

Then I remind myself that I was taking macro-economics course in fall of 2008, getting near daily reports from an visibly panicked university professor on the downfall our economic system.

So yeah fuck those guys.

They put the country in a situation where if the American people did not give them large quantities of tax payer money it would be economic armageddon. It was a goddamned protection racket.Give us money or your economy won't look so nice.



And very little has changed. Nobody was punished and a good number of the polices that got us to that point are still going on. Let me say it again. Fuck those guys!

Whenever I find myself getting wasteful, greedy or even over-aspirational, this is the movie I watch to remind me why I have such strong feelings on the matter. How the greed and pride of maybe 100 men doomed the country to a nearly decade long down economy. Fuck those guys!


Okay glad I got that off my chest. Anyway on to the movie about the financial collapse of 2008, rather than the financial collapse of 2008.

Too big to fail is probably my favorite of what I dub HBO's political trilogy, the other two movies being Game Change and Recount. Each of these movies tries to take a defining yet baffling moment in contemporary American history and explain more or less the why of it. Here it's trying to explain the why of the financial collapse you get to see brief moments where it may have been diverted and why that didn't happen.  You can see the powers that be scrambling to find a way out and some douche kicking them in the shins at every turn, mostly because they're in the midst of a problem that may be in thier collect interest to solve but not in thier self interest.

All the banks were effected by the collapse and stopping it would have meant helping business competitors.  Which to them was counter to everything they've ever thought about business. And that sums up the entirety of the crisis. Things occurring in ways that run counter to traditional...well post-Regan logic. Which is why I love that this movie exists. As much as I want to burn Wall Street in effigy I will admit, begrudgingly, that they were doing what years of profits told them it made sense to do. Their job, their purpose in life, is to generate money. In their minds if the books are black the world is at peace. There is golden defining moment in the film where Hank Paulson, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury at the time is asked after sitting in room describing out loud the lunacy of the situation why nobody thought to regulate this stuff, "We were making too much money."