It's too bad that Charles Ferguson's brilliant documentary about the 2008 global financial crisis didn't enjoy as much publicity as Michael Moore's demagogic rants. I saw Inside Job by chance only because, one evening in December, we met friends who had seen the film the same afternoon. They were still shaken.
We went the next day and shaken we were, indeed. I'm anything but a radical, but when the film ended, I was in such a fury against the powers that be that I felt like throwing up. If I were 18, I would have enrolled in the Naomi Klein club.
Unfortunately, Inside Job had not been hyped in the media. No wonder I almost missed it, although it had been playing since October at Montreal's AMC Forum. I discovered that, even in the major English Canadian and American daily newspapers, this documentary had hardly been mentioned, except for several complimentary articles.
Of course, I knew the main lines of the financial crisis. But the devil was in the details. Mr. Ferguson, the producer-director of Inside Job, connects the dots and provides us with a clear and shocking picture of what happened.
His major point is that, contrary to what many financial experts pretend, the crisis was not unavoidable. It was not the mere product of greedy bankers running a machine that somehow took on a life of its own, destroying millions of lives throughout the world as it furiously evolved like some sort of financial tsunami.
The crisis, Mr. Ferguson explains, was triggered by political decisions – in particular, by the steadfast refusal of American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George Bush to impose a set of regulations on Wall Street.
The political culprits were Republicans as well as Democrats. They were advised by economists who believed in deregulation, this belief presumably reinforced by the fact that many of these economists – the brightest lights of the best American universities – were financially linked, either as highly paid advisers or as board members, to the financial institutions that wanted to be free from state-imposed control. Meantime, the supposedly independent credit-ratings agencies were giving top marks to the toxic investments that precipitated the crisis.
Inside Job exposes these giant conflicts of interest with stunning cinematographic techniques and dramatic interviews, yet always in a serious and well-documented manner, making the demonstration much more damning than Michael Moore's clownish tactics.
The documentary ends on an especially depressing note, at least for those who hoped that Barack Obama was going to change things. Far from punishing Wall Street for what could be seen as a financial crime against humanity, the new President reappointed some of the main culprits of the crisis to the same positions of control – Lawrence Summers at the National Economic Council, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, and so on. (Since the film was released, Mr. Summers was replaced as NEC director by Gene Sperling, an economist who had received nearly $900,000 from Goldman Sachs in 2008 for various consulting jobs.)
Inside Job is not a diatribe against capitalism or the free-market economy. It calls for more regulations over the financial institutions and for a cap to the indecent remunerations of the Wall Street supremos. There's certainly something to be learned from Canada, which avoided the brunt of the crisis in part because our banks are subject to more government control than in the United States.