Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2011, as a fresh recommendation shortly after the film’s Oscar win.
I’ve just watched the documentary Inside Job, the 2010 documentary that won the Oscar. It features all kinds of people, and a few “characters”, who describe their experiences and roles while the world’s worst financial crisis since 1929 was taking shape. The film shows how the crisis really was an “inside job”, a collective crime committed from within, devised by bankers, politicians, rating agencies and bureaucrats who used deregulation to create and promote complex financial instruments.
The documentary shows what has been said on other occasions: this crisis was no accident; it was premeditated. In fact, when the crisis hit, two things happened at once:
- Huge private profits
- Huge public losses
Finding the culprits shouldn’t be hard: you just have to look at the first group. The film discusses how people turned a blind eye when the subprime market blew up, so that they could get their hands on the lifetime savings of ordinary people.
By the end of the documentary you’ll reach one conclusion: we went looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the biggest financial weapon of mass destruction was already well placed all over the world.
If we held people accountable for the crisis, the prisons would be full of bankers, politicians and rating agencies.
Robbing a bank carries an eight-year sentence. What sentence should the banking system get for robbing the whole of society?
I strongly recommend watching the documentary if you haven’t had the chance yet.
Featured image: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
