This is a very small and interesting documentary about the housing bubble and collapse of 2007 and 2008. The filmmakers, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn are both ultra-liberals (he's a columnist for The Nation) and clearly and concisely tell the story of government deregulation, banking greed and private pain.
There are two main villains in the story. The first is former Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) who was the chairman of the Senate banking committee in 2000 and got legislation passed at the end of the term to deregulate the banking industry in a way never before seen in American history. The other bad guy is Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who continually told congress (really from the 1990s through the end of his chairmanship) that the free market was totally foolproof and honest.
The actions of both of these men (along with help from others) got the economy into a gigantic mess. The film shows how housing lenders free of laws that formerly regulated and kept them more honest, began selling sub-prime mortgages to poor and fixed income people and minorities living in tough urban neighborhoods. It shows how these mortgages were bundled, chopped up and resold and then given high grades by rating agencies who were involved in the deal.
The structure of the film has these historical and technical parts alternating with stories about individuals who were sold these mortgages and subsequently lost their homes. These stories are rather banal at this point - we've read and seen the tear-jerking stories for the past year or more. There's not much new here. But one sequence that's really wonderful has a man in Southern California whose job it is to monitor the health and safety of swimming pools. He shows how the amount of homes with unused pools went up dramatically during 2007 and 2008 (people losing their homes would push their garbage into the pools rather than cleaning up their yards). The amount of mosquitoes in these pools also went up dramatically in this period as people stopped cleaning and using them.
This is a very good movie and I like that it only runs an hour and a half. The filmmakers are very economical with their storytelling and use very evocative imagery (like the mosquitoes) to tell the emotional part of the story. Still, I wish there was a bit more detail in the narrative. I think some people - especailly centrist members of Congresss - are let off too easy. There are a ton of villians in this story and I think it's simplistic to only mention two of them. (What about Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin and Larry Summers? Weren't they a part of this too?).
Stars: 3 of 4
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