The Big Short

Finance is difficult to understand. That's not me offering up an opinion, and that's not intended to be a subjective statement. Finance is deliberately difficult to understand. If it weren't engineered to be difficult to understand, we'd all be crack investors living high and large. No, finance is a language developed by the greedy to make the common person feel stupid and stay poor. All the better to keep bleeding that sweet, sweet money. This is a point made very early on in The Big Short: you're an idiot, and that's okay. Nobody expects any more of you, and The Big Short, while it won't hold your hand, also won't talk down to you. But, see, here's the thing: what happens in The Big Short is actually quite simple. A group of freaks (I say that endearingly) who speak in numbers predict that the housing market is in danger of imminent collapse in spite of looking quite healthy. This is due to the humongous increase in approved subprime loans that carry high risk and are seeing fewer and fewer return payments. Taking the opportunity to fuck the banks over for once, these number freaks invest big, big money that they don't have into betting against the housing market, something the banks are more than happy to jump on board with because, remember, everything looks gravy right now. Eventually, they come to realise that the scope and scale of this fraudulent activity on American citizens stretches so far that not only will the housing market collapse, but so will the entire economy. Not only that, but they're not sticking it to the banks at all; the banks know they're about to go under, and they're ready to bail themselves out with poor people's tax dollars. The economy collapses, the number freaks successfully get rich and unsuccessfully fuck the banks over, leaving them miserable, and the banks aren't brought to answer for a single one of their crimes. Ask me if I described that correctly. Go on, ask me. I'm serious. 
"Did you describe that correctly?"
I don't fucking know! I'm not good with numbers, and this shit doesn't make any fucking sense. There is an incredible scene early on in the film where Christian Bale's character, Michael Burry, has just bet somewhere in the range of a billion dollars on the housing market collapsing about two years from now. His hedge fund company has assets totaling around $550 million, and paying premiums of roughly $100 million a month, that gives him about six months of being rich and claiming to be right before being broke and claiming to be right. Understandably, his top investors are pretty sweaty about this. In a confrontation that is heated only on one side, Burry's top investors, one of them his mentor, claim that he has to be joking. Burry, wearing a tattered surf t-shirt, khaki shorts and no shoes, one glass eye drifting aimlessly, mouth half curled as if he's on the verge of understanding a joke we haven't heard yet, quietly says, and I paraphrase and call on earlier scenes, "I don't know how to joke. I don't know how to be funny. Every time I try to complement someone, it somehow comes out like an insult ("That's a nice haircut. Did you do it yourself?"). All I know, is numbers. And I know I'm right." His mentor isn't swayed by his quiet, puppy dog self-disparagement. "Give me my fucking money, you motherfucker." Burry slowly spins his office chair to turn his back to his visitors, trying to communicate to them in the only way he knows how that they can fuck right off. "No," he replies. Burry continually struggles to communicate the reality of this situation to everyone he speaks to, which interestingly is reflected on the whole of The Big Short itself. Remember, finance is difficult to understand, but as it's the central conceit of the film, writer/director Adam McKay certainly goes to lengths to help you understand. Or does he? Throughout the film's duration, I kept changing my mind on whether he was trying to break the nuts and bolts of this concept into digestible pieces of only the necessary information, or whether he was trying to prove that it doesn't matter how you dress up an impenetrable concept, because it will always be impenetrable. Every now and then, he'll pause the film to have celebrities jump in and break down some of the lingo for you. The first is Margot Robbie, sipping champagne whilst taking a bubble bath, as she explains to you what a subprime loan is. It's funny, but I didn't finish the scene understanding any more about housing loans or the housing market in general than when I went in, because Robbie continued to use the convoluted dialogue every other character had been using up until that point. In another example, however, Selena Gomez uses a game of blackjack to describe what a synthetic collateralised debt obligation is, and the far-reaching financial implications that it holds. Ah, now we have something analogous! This is something that's been reframed around my cultural background; something that I can digest. Could I deliver a lecture on the difference between a CDO and a synthetic CDO? Ask me. Come on, ask me.
"Could you deliver a lecture on the difference between a CDO and a synthetic CDO?"
Of course I fucking couldn't! Selena Gomez could be framing it through fucking UNO and it would still be too complicated for me to wrap my head around. But, what I do have now is some context, and some framing, to apply to the situation at hand. I know, based on my understanding of the word 'fraud', and my understanding that a lot of hired-out money to multiple people that cannot pay it back does not hold good prospects, that this is a situation that, as someone who has identified in my life as lower-middle class, is something I should be mad about. But if I'm to keep having this discussion, I need to be able to talk some of the language. Gomez helped me out. Robbie just shouted jargon at me and told me to fuck off. It leaves me wondering what Adam McKay's intent was with The Big Short. Take another film about money, for instance. Though its ultimate intent is to be a case study on the nature of addiction in general, The Wolf of Wall Street has a lot of complicated financial trickery to cover so that you understand how Jordan Belfort got so much fuck you money. And yet, when it comes time for him to be breaking it down for you, he cuts it off midway to acknowledge that you're probably not following, and that's okay, because the most important thing to know is that what he was doing was not legal in the slightest. I appreciate that sentiment, in spite of the fact that I felt my intelligence to be slightly insulted, because The Wolf of Wall Street was being respectfully upfront. The Big Short seems slightly more schizophrenic in its intent. When it calls me an idiot, I can't necessarily disagree, but I also often feel like it hasn't given me the shot to prove otherwise. However, in saying that, perhaps the film did give me every chance. Perhaps I didn't pay enough attention, because I, like most other people, glaze over when intentionally murky numbers and dialogue come into play. And perhaps that's the movie's greatest point. Yes, finance is difficult to understand, but that's because it was made to be that way. If you accept that, you're accepting that you will continue to be fucked over however and whenever your bank pleases. But, and I know this is hard because finance is not only difficult to understand, but boring as fuck, if you acknowledge that it's important, and you pay attention, which I know you have the power to do, you can start to learn, and you can continue to learn, and you can start having discussions, and you can be wrong, and you can learn why you were wrong, and you can learn how to not be wrong the next time, and you can continue to build and amass and develop until, suddenly, you know as much as the banks do. And though they may have the power, you may have the ability to take some of that power away. Not all of it, but just think about how much you could take if everyone had this knowledge. I mean, if we want to get really idealistic, we could bring the banks and the big corps to their knees. We could start a revolution. It has to start somewhere, right? We could stop liking Facebook posts and thinking that's somehow making a change, and start acting. We could find the banks' weaknesses and exploit them, together. We could ensure that there is no tax money to swipe from the poor to bail them out this time. We could make them answer. We could make them pay. We could do this. We really could. But, then again, finance is really difficult to understand. So, what am I saying? The Big Short is an excellent film that raises a tremendous problem only to conclude that there's really nothing we can do about it because we're just too dumb. And, offended as that may leave me, I can't exactly say that's wrong.