Inside Job, a film review

Iain Thom, Scottish campaigns assistant

Timed for release just as this year’s round of bonuses and bank profits are announced, documentary film ‘Inside Job’ does just what it says on the reel tin:  Director Charles Ferguson argues that both investment bankers and financial regulators knew that the way banks and hedge funds turned a profit was rotten to the core, but that they carried on regardless. 

In short, that the 2008 financial crisis was avoidable.

Authoritative US professors and industry figures are interviewed, including the ubiquitous George Soros, but there is also a long list of names that refused to appear, the food commodity traders Goldman Sachs high up on that list.  The interviews are widely interspersed with narrative shots but sometimes I felt the chopping and changing did not allow the personalities to come through.

The film is almost exclusively US-based.  We learn of bankers who earned massive bonuses on short-term profits in a mortgage market with incentives so perverse it was set up to fail, and of regulators staffed by people who made millions from the rotten system and who simply did not do their job.

Foreclosures and job losses across the US as a result of the credit crunch cardiac arrest and the public bail-out are depicted but I can’t help thinking the film here lacked a global view.  Thousands of poor people in the US were conned into buying subprime mortgages and when house prices fell life got very hard.  But since 2008 the global impacts on developing countries has been massive and surely worth a mention.  And the City of London, who continue to play the same casino games, get off scot free.

The film is designed to anger but offers no solutions.  It does not mention the food price hikes that happened when traders pulled out of the mortgage market and piled into commodities like wheat and maize.

If you do go to see this film you’d better hop quickly back to WDM where we do have some solutions and actions to take.  Our food speculation campaign is creating public pressure to regulate bankers to curb their excessive speculation on food prices and prevent another global food crisis. And after UK taxpayers’ bought 83% of ‘oil and gas’ bank RBS we’re taking action to increase their green and ethical investment during Climate Week and at their AGM this April.

Watch the film, but come back here for the solutions.