You’ll need a clear head to follow this impressive and angry American doc about the financial meltdown, as it races through late-twentieth-century American economic policy in an effort to pinpoint the roots of the recent crisis – which director Charles Ferguson attributes to an unholy alliance between politics, academia and big business.
Ferguson is an academic and IT entrepreneur in his fifties who only turned to filmmaking in the past decade. His film about the Iraq war, ‘No End In Sight’, was his first, and for this new hot potato he draws on a roll-call of 42 interviewees, from George Soros to a prostitute who often served high-rolling investment bankers. That’s a lot of boardrooms, bookcases and views over the Hudson, but Ferguson tempers these scenes with slick photography, some of it exterior, aerial shots of Manhattan or rural Iceland.
You’ll need these interludes to counter the rush of facts and figures. Ferguson take us from deregulation in Wall Street in the 1980s and ’90s to a series of later calamities that the government failed to act on, from the 2001 dot-com crash to the collapse of Bear Stearns. He argues ... Read more
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