Michael Lewis - The Big Short: The Secret Springs of Financial Disaster. Big short game
Even if you have watched the movie of the same name, I strongly advise you to read this book. How did a handful of outsider visionaries capitalize on a mortgage crisis that no one believed in? If you are interested in the answer to the question of why the most devastating financial crisis in the United States actually occurred, then it is in front of you. In his book, financial journalist Michael Lewis talks about how the insatiable desire for wealth led to a trap, and successful financiers, brokers and analysts did not even notice how they fell into it. Only a small number of professionals were able to figure out what was happening and use the situation to their own advantage. It is curious that all these visionaries were distinguished by a complex character, and their career path did not develop in a straight line. Cynicism in them was strangely combined with sincerity; they did not take the opinions of recognized experts for granted and constantly asked uncomfortable questions. Portraits of these "outsiders", descriptions of their decisions and actions form the outline of the book. The author does not adhere to chronology, making excursions into history and explaining the work financial instruments. Michael Lewis is a financial journalist and author of several best-selling books, including Moneyball, Liar's Poker and The Flash Boys. In the late 1980s, he worked as a trader for Salomon Brothers. I recommend this fascinating and in-depth study to those readers whose professional activities are related to finance, and to those who are simply interested in knowing how money is made in the stock market.
Reluctant analyst. Steve Eisman is one of a very small number of people who not only foresaw the coming financial crisis 2008, but also managed to make money on it. Eisman grew up in New York and graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School. Quickly disillusioned with his career as a lawyer, he took a job as a financial analyst at Oppenheimer in the early 1990s. At the time, no one on Wall Street really listened to analysts. One thing was expected of them - conclusions that would suit everyone. But Eisman believed that he had the right to say what he thought. Very soon, the fame of an analyst was fixed for him, the conclusions of which necessarily lead to turmoil in the market. He knew how to make a fuss and go against other people's opinions, he was distinguished by arrogance, rudeness and cockiness.
In 2002, while working as an analyst at the large hedge fund Chilton Investment, Eisman caught his eye on the statements of Household Finance Corporation. This company specialized in refinancing mortgage loans. Eisman found out that she was cheating borrowers. Household offered to take a mortgage loan for 15 years at 7%, but in reality interest rate was about 12.5%. Eisman tried to disseminate this information as widely as possible through the media, public organizations and officials. As a result, Household had to resort to pre-trial settlement of the conflict, paying a fine of $484 million. About a year later, the company was sold to the British bank HSBC for $15.5 billion. The head of Household earned $100 million from the deal. This story changed Eisman's worldview. From a Republican, he began to gradually turn into a Democrat, and in the work of the banking system - to see the desire of bankers to cash in on ordinary citizens. In 2004, Eisman retired and founded a hedge fund at Morgan Stanley "For a share of the reward, Morgan Stanley provided him with an office, furniture and assistants, that is, everything but money."
“Who, before the casino realized it, managed to figure out that the roulette wheel began to spin with a predictable result Who else, on the sidelines of the modern financial system, saw the broken screws of its mechanism”
Issue and sell
By 2005, the subprime mortgage industry was booming. The volume of bonds backed by such loans has increased to half a trillion dollars this year. This complex financial business was supported by poor borrowers. Many of them had no real opportunity to pay off their debts. But Wall Street financiers believed that this would not have serious consequences. Even if some borrowers become insolvent, lenders do not bear significant risks, since real estate, under the security of which loans are issued, grows in price.
“From a social standpoint, the slow and perhaps unscrupulous collapse of the multi-billion dollar bond market was a disaster. From a hedge fund standpoint, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Chasing the number of loans issued, financiers cast aside doubts about their quality. Instead of lending only to solvent borrowers, they adopted a different principle: “You can lend, just don’t keep loans on your balance sheet.” That is, with the help of investment banks, these loans immediately turned into bonds, which were then purchased by investors. Long Beach Savings was the first bank to implement such a model. She quickly gained popularity. A special company, B&C mortgage, was even created, whose activities were limited to the issuance and subsequent sale of loans. This company was subsequently acquired by Lehman Brothers.
To understand what happened, we need to remember that since the 1980s, it was not stocks at all, but bonds, that is, debt securities, that brought the Wall Street bankers the lion's share of income. Bonds proved to be a more efficient and less regulated financial instrument. This business is incomprehensible to most people, but when mortgage bonds began to bring real money, the complexity of this business only added to its attractiveness.
“Even in the summer of 2006, when house prices began to fall, very few saw the ugly facts, reacted to them, and, one might say, saw the old witch in the features of a beautiful young girl.”
"Debt Towers"
The trading of bonds backed by subprime mortgages was practically incomprehensible, not only to ordinary citizens, but also to regulators. Greed, incompetence and fear made it possible. And this construction, or, as Steve Eisman later called it, the infernal machine, was assembled from various ingenious financial instruments. These included, for example, CDOs - securities secured by debentures. In fact, they masked the risk that low-quality loans carried.
“The market for “synthetic” securities has removed all restrictions on the amount of risk associated with the issuance of subprime mortgage loans. You no longer needed billions of dollars of real mortgages to bet a billion dollars. All that was needed was someone willing to take the opposite position in the deal.”
Creating a CDO looked like this. Imagine that a mortgage bond is a tower that is made up of many mortgages. The higher the floor, the lower the risk, but the lower the return. From a hundred of these towers, you take a floor, and from these hundred floors (mostly the lowest, that is, low-quality, with a BBB rating), build another tower. The investment bank Goldman Sachs has figured out a great way to downplay "perceived risks" by presenting this new "tower" of the lowest quality bonds as a "diversified portfolio of assets". And the rating agencies that Goldman Sachs and other banks paid well for the rating they wanted, despite common sense rated 80% of this new prefabricated tower AAA. Goldman Sachs went further and created an even more confusing tool that neither investors nor synthetic CDO rating agencies could understand. There was “nothing but credit default swaps” behind these securities.
One-eyed in the "land of the blind"
Another investor who saw disaster coming was Michael Barry. He worked as a doctor, but at some point he became interested in studying the mechanisms of the stock market. Barry created the Scion Capital fund, which quickly became a very successful financial company.
“The mechanism that turned pure lead into an alloy consisting of 80% gold and 20% lead took the remaining lead and also turned it into 80% gold.”
Barry was unusually attentive and creative in working with information. He was looking for what others did not notice. He paid increased attention to the shares, which he called "pah-investments." For example, at the mention of Avant! Corporation Barry stumbled across the Internet while looking for litigation that could give him an idea for investing. Avant! was engaged in software development, and she was accused of stealing someone else's program code. The director of the company, pleading guilty, ended up behind bars. Avant! had to pay huge fines, and the price of its shares fell from 12 to 2 dollars. Barry bought a large stake in Avant! at a low price, and then demanded reforms in the company. As a result, when the price of its shares exceeded $ 22, he made good money. Barry's acquaintances considered the story with Avant! a classic example of a typical deal for him.
“During the dark and strange period from early February to June 2007, the subprime mortgage market was like a giant balloon held by a dozen big Wall Street firms.”
But Barry's greatest triumph was his shorting of subprime mortgages. In 2004, he began to study them carefully. Soon, the imperfection of the system for issuing such loans became obvious to Barry. He realized that a crisis in the real estate market is inevitable, and the moment it comes, it will be possible to make good money. Barry began buying credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds.
In essence, credit default swaps were an insurance policy. Let's say you purchase a $100 million credit default swap in a large company's bonds. Its term is 10 years, and each year you must pay insurance premiums in the amount of, say, $200,000. If this company defaults on the bonds within 10 years, then you earn 100 million. They will be paid to you by the credit default swap seller. If the company still honors its obligations on its bonds, then you lose $ 2 million - the amount of insurance premiums for all 10 years.
“We prepared for Armageddon,” says Eisman, “but deep down we feared what if Armageddon never came.”
Barry was counting on the fact that the worst borrowers, who are at the base of the pyramid, will not be able to pay off their debts. This eventually happened, providing him with a huge jackpot. Barry fit perfectly into the small circle of people who understood the workings of the infernal machine. He was a loner who shunned people, also because he lost an eye in childhood due to an illness. The absence of an eye, Barry believed, both narrowed his field of vision and allowed him to look at the problem more broadly. His chief oddities were his acute sensitivity to injustice and his habit of always remaining as frank as possible.
“The most powerful and highly paid financiers have been completely discredited; without government intervention, they would all lose their jobs. Nevertheless, these same financiers used the government to enrich themselves.”
The infernal machine picks up speed
In January 2007, Steve Eisman visited annual conference on low-quality papers in Las Vegas. The conference allowed him to understand many important things. At one of the dinners, Eisman met Vin Chau, an active player in the CDO market. Chau made a fortune buying AAA-rated CDOs backed by BBB-rated mortgage bonds. Why would he, who undoubtedly knew the true value of these valuable papers, they were acquired by Just Chau earned on volumes. Moreover, he expected that the number of “junk” CDOs in the market would increase all the time, which would allow him to earn even more.
Eisman's other discovery involved rating agencies such as Moody's and S&P. At the conference, Eisman and his partners noticed for the first time how incompetent the people who work in rating agencies are. They had neither talent nor information. Many of the employees of the rating agencies had no idea about the risks they were supposed to manage. They were distinguished by an amazing naivety, a complete lack of interest and a desire to spend as little time as possible at work. They were not even aware of the catastrophe that was about to break out.
“How to make people feel richer with low wages Give them cheap loans.”
After the conference, Eisman became convinced that Wall Street, and the bond market in particular, were in much worse shape than he had imagined. Greed and extraneous interests have completely taken over the market. It got out of hand and was now doomed.
“Success in investing is determined by the correct price paid for risk.”
star trader
In addition to pessimists like Iceman or Barry, there were other people in the market who realized that you could make very good money buying insurance on subprime mortgages. One of them was Howie Hubler, a star trader at Morgan Stanley. Hubler was not distinguished by good manners. If someone began to reasonably challenge his decisions, then he could easily send such an opponent to hell. In 2004, his department brought the bank 400 million in profits, and by mid-2006 - almost a billion.
Fearing the departure of Hubler, who was no longer satisfied with the work of a simple trader, the management of Morgan Stanley invited him to create and lead his own trading group. Had it succeeded, it could have grown into a stand-alone investment firm half owned by Hubler. Among other things, his group had to deal with low-quality CDOs. By January 2007, Hubler had purchased CDOs for more than $16 billion. These securities seemed to him of high quality, although, of course, they were not. When the crisis hit, about 40% of Hubler's securities were completely worthless.
“Bond sellers can say and do whatever they want without being accountable to any regulator. Bond traders can use insider information without fear of being grabbed by the hand.”
Hubler knew that sooner or later he would fall into a crisis situation, but he underestimated the possible scale of the losses. Ironically, Morgan Stanley fooled itself. It is this investment bank convinced rating agencies to treat consumer loans the same as corporate loans. Rating agencies began to give the highest ratings to mortgage-backed bonds that were issued to insolvent borrowers. And Hubler and his colleagues believed in these estimates. As one risk manager at Morgan Stanley remarked, “It's one thing to bet on red or black, knowing that you're betting on red or black. And it’s quite another thing to bet on some kind of red color and not understand it.” Nevertheless, no one was tormented by remorse about this.
It's nobody's fault
The catastrophe approached gradually. Bonds by mortgage loans depreciated immediately. First, the borrower was required to pay an unbearable amount, then the bankruptcy procedure began, after which the property of the insolvent borrower was put up for sale. All this took several months. The condition of mortgage bonds was like a slow but dangerous disease. So the financial crisis that forced Bear Stearns out of the market and forced the government to bail out insurance company AIG was only the beginning.
Eisman, Barry, and a small number of other investors emerged victorious from the situation. Vin Chau's CDO business went under, but he made millions himself. Hubler broke all Wall Street records for losses brought to his employer, but his personal fortune he increased by millions of dollars. Like the directors of financial institutions deemed “too big to fail,” neither Chau nor Hubler took any personal responsibility for their actions. Hence, many novice leaders could conclude that no one is punished for incompetent decisions.
“There are more assholes than fraudsters, but the latter are in a higher position” (Vincent [Vinnie] Daniel, accountant-auditor in Steven Eisman's team).
After the crisis subsided, theories arose according to which banks simply faced a crisis of confidence, but in fact they did not need governmental support. Researchers with more realistic views have linked the 2008 crisis to practices that arose in the 1980s after the creation of the first CDOs. Another reason was the trend on Wall Street to transform the form of ownership of financial firms-partnerships became public companies. The consequences of any erroneous decisions were thus shifted from a small group of partners to the shoulders of shareholders. In a broader sense, the cause of the crisis was greed, not only of bankers, but also of investors.
Michael Lewis
Big Short:
The secret springs of financial disaster
The most difficult things can be explained even to the last stupid, if he does not yet have an idea about them; but even in the simplest one cannot convince someone who is firmly convinced that he knows what in question.
Leo Tolstoy, 1897
Prologue
Poltergeist
It remains a mystery to me to this day that a Wall Street investment bank would pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars for my investment advice. As a 24-year-old, I had no experience at the time in forecasting the ups and downs of stocks and bonds. Yes, and there was no particular desire to do this either. Wall Street's most important function was to allocate capital, in other words, to decide who got the money and who didn't. And believe me, I didn't know much about any of this. Neither accounting education, nor experience in managing a company - there were no own savings that could be disposed of. In 1985, by pure chance, I got into Salomon Brothers, and in 1988 I left there a much wealthier person. And although I have written a whole book about my work at the company, everything that has happened so far seems ridiculous to me - and this is one of the reasons why I gave up money so easily. My position seemed too precarious to me. Sooner or later, someone would lead me, as well as many others like me, to clean water. Sooner or later, the hour of great reckoning would come, Wall Street would wake up from sleep and drive from financial sphere hundreds if not thousands of youngsters like me who had no right to risk other people's money or persuade other people to risk it.
My experience, Liar's Poker, was told from the perspective of a young man who washed his hands in time. It was as if I had scribbled and bottled a note for those who would follow in my footsteps in the distant future. If all these events are not recorded on paper by their direct participant, I thought, no one in the future will believe that such a thing could ever happen.
Everything that has been written about Wall Street up to that point has dealt primarily with the stock market. From the beginning, Wall Street has focused on the stock market. My book, on the other hand, dealt primarily with the bond market, as Wall Street made much more money at the time by bundling, selling, and manipulating growing US debt. This situation, in my opinion, could not last forever. I felt like I was writing about a bygone era, the 1980s, when the American people lost their financial sanity. I expected readers of the future to be horrified to learn how in 1986, Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund, who received $ 3.1 million, almost ruined the company. I thought they'd be startled by the story of Howie Rubin, the Salomon Brothers mortgage-bond trader who went to Merrill Lynch and immediately inflicted a $250 million loss on the company. a vague idea of the colossal risk their traders are taking.
This is the picture I painted; but the fact that after reading my story and my reminiscences, readers would say: “How interesting,” I could not even imagine. How naive of me! Not for a second could I imagine that the 1980s would drag on for another two decades in the world of finance, or that the quantitative gap between Wall Street and the real economy would eventually grow into a qualitative one. That a trader can make $47 million a year and feel left out. That the mortgage bond market, which started out on the floor of Salomon Brothers and seemed like a great idea at the time, would turn out to be one of the biggest financial disasters in history. That exactly 20 years after Howie Rubin was embarrassed nationwide by embezzling $250 million, another trader from Morgan Stanley, also named Howie, will lose $9 billion on a single trade. And yet only a narrow circle of people in the company itself will know what he did and why.
When I started working on the first book, I did not set myself global tasks, but just wanted to tell the world an exciting, from my point of view, story. But if, after giving me a drink or two, you were curious about what effect this book would have on readers, I would say something along the lines of: “I hope it will fall into the hands of college students who cannot decide on their careers; they will read it, understand that it is not worth making money on fraud and deceit, and give up the fiery or timid dream of becoming financiers. I cherished the hope that some wunderkind at Ohio State University with a dream of being an oceanographer would read my book, turn down an offer from Goldman Sachs, and sail the seas.
Regency Enterprises
Paramount Pictures
The plot of the picture is dedicated to how several financial analysts and employees of hedge funds on Wall Street were able to predict the development of the crisis and played down the price of mortgage bonds, earning a fortune. The film received high critical acclaim for its depth of theme and skillful balance of artistic merit with a fairly plausible presentation of the market and economic mechanisms that underlay the economic collapse.
Plot
The action of the picture begins in 2005. The eccentric financial genius, the manager of the hedge fund Scion Capital, Michael Burry has a premonition that the US mortgage market may soon burst. In this regard, he insures about a billion dollars of his clients through a credit default swap. Clients of the Bury fund are worried, because the loan market seemed very stable, but he firmly stands his ground. Wall Street notices this strange activity, and soon several financiers realize that Burry's fears are justified. Moreover, by playing for a fall, you can make good money.
Independently begin to develop the theme: Front Point agency and young investors Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley. Front Point CEO Mark Baum, on a tip from Deutsche Bank trader Jared Vennett, is trying to understand the nature of the problem. Vennet draws attention to the CDO. These bond tranches have long failed to meet the rating they are given without due diligence. Common practice in the market is to mix 'A' and 'B' junk papers and assign the highest rating to the entire bond portfolio. Baum and his people personally go to the suburbs of Miami in order to check on the ground that the mortgage market is really overheated and a default is possible in the near future. After talking to locals and realtors, Baum realizes that the situation is indeed threatening. Massive loan defaults are only a matter of time. Geller and Shipley also come up with the idea of swaps and contact retired broker Ben Rickert. Through it they go to Deutsche Bank and enter into swap deals. Meanwhile, Baum learns about synthetic CDOs (), which are a pyramid scheme, the existence of which is turned a blind eye by regulatory authorities.
Front Point, Geller and Shipley are buying large sums of swaps on the assumption that when mortgage bonds fall in price, they will short their trades and more than return their investments. Comes 2007 and predictions begin to come true. A wave of mortgage defaults is rising across the country, however, bonds that reinforce debt obligations have not yet fallen in price. Trying to make sense of this paradox, Baum visits the office of Standard & Poor's. Why does the rating agency persist in assigning AAA ratings to dubious portfolios? An employee of the agency explains that they are forced to do this, otherwise the banks will go to competitors and still get the necessary rating there. The collapse in the price of securities only begins when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers go bankrupt in the wake of the crisis. One by one, the heroes of the picture begin to get rid of their swaps with great profit. Mark Baum at the last moment begins to doubt, because the funds that he will receive are the money of ordinary people, at the expense of which they eliminate the consequences of the crisis. However, he closes the deal.
Cast
Scenario
Michael Lewis in an interview noted that he never understood the reasons for the attention to his books in Hollywood. Recognition for him as an author worthy of a film adaptation came after the box office success of The Blind Side, based on the book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (). In 2010, Lewis published his documentary study The Big Short. The Secret Springs of Financial Disaster”, which soon became a bestseller. The book was read by Adam McKay and recommended that Paramount Pictures consider making a film adaptation. McKay, better known for comedies, moreover, audience-oriented with undemanding taste, unexpectedly chose a serious topic as a kind of challenge to himself. McKay especially liked the final plot twist, when the characters realize that they have made a bet against the foundations of the entire economy, the basis of existence, in a sense, against themselves.
In 2013, Paramount Studios acquired the rights to the book and outsourced production to Brad Pitt and Plan B Entertainment. Brad already had a positive experience of filming Lewis's works in the analytical film "The Man Who Changed Everything" and he immediately agreed. In March 2014, Adam McKay was officially signed on to direct the project. Charles Randolph became his co-writer on a future project.
The script took about 6 months to complete. Randolph, when creating characters, was inspired by the mood of the early comedies of Milos Forman and the painting The Tail Wags the Dog. The plot of the book was significantly reworked, a part with events in Florida appeared (which was not in the book). The financial component has been simplified, but not too much. Such a scene, where Jared Venette explains to colleagues with the help of the Jenga tower the mechanism of the ICB pyramid, as the screenwriter noted, there can only be one in the film. The main characters of the tape are professionals who are already familiar with the functioning of the securities market. The explanation is made for the viewer, but it is undesirable to abuse such lectures in a feature film. Having found a lot of footnotes-explanations for terms in Lewis's book, McKay decided to add a digression-inset performed by guest stars to the outline of the plot.
Creation
The selection of actors went quickly - in just three weeks, confirmations were received from everyone. The film featured four Oscar winners (Bale, Melissa Leo, Tomei, Pitt) and two nominees (Gosling and Carell). In January 2015, the studio officially announced that the selection of actors and locations for nature was completed, and confirmed the possibility of filming the picture in a month. Filming began on March 18, 2015, over a period of approximately 50 days, mostly in New Orleans. Separate episodes were captured in New York and Las Vegas. The interior of the Lehman Brothers office was recreated in the lobby of the New York State Financial Services Authority building in Manhattan.
Cinematographer Barry Aykroyd noted that he wanted to shoot it "not too beautifully and not too pretentiously", adhering to the documentary approach and black comedy tone set by the director. The picture was shot on film, in Super-35 format on Panavision equipment, with an Angenieux () 24-290mm lens with spherical lenses (in some episodes 17-80mm and 15-40mm), frame in an aspect ratio of 2.35: 1. For the zoom and handheld effect that Aykroyd loves so much, a specially designed Panavision camera was used, which was first used for The Last Face.
McKay, noticing that his entire ensemble cast looked too good, stated that they would not be movie stars in this film. Most of the efforts of the director demanded the image of Michael Bury. This character is the only one who has retained the name of his real prototype, and according to the plot, he is in a certain vacuum, not communicating with other main characters. actors. With Christian Bale, the director worked on the image for about 10 days. Shortly before filming, Bale badly injured his knee and could barely move. In one of the first scenes, he had to play one of the compositions of the Pantera group on a drum kit, demonstrating the eccentric passions of a financial genius. The actor coped with a difficult scene. Michael Bury, who advised the creators, sent Christian Bale his clothes to make him look authentic in the frame. At the request of the director, Steve Carell gained about 20 pounds of weight (8 kg). Ryan Gosling put in dark contact lenses and ruined his hair. The stylists also had to work on the hairstyle of Brad Pitt, whose image was complemented by a beard.
financial advisor pictures became journalist Adam Davidson (). McKay, fearing that the picture would remain too complex for the average viewer, agreed with the film studio for more test screenings with focus groups than is usually the case. There were six in total. The first version of the director's cut was 150 minutes long. After working with focus groups, the duration was reduced to 130 minutes.
The premiere and limited screening took place as part of the film festival on September 22, 2015. The film was released in wide release on December 11.
Criticism
As Andrew Barker of Variety noted, it's hard to imagine that the same director made Cops Deep in Stock, Anchorman and The Big Short. However, mindful of the director's previous works, most experts attributed it to the comedy genre, reflecting the general trend of Hollywood with a humorous approach to serious and even tragic topics. Peter Travers (Rolling Stone) even called it a disaster comedy.
The picture was highly appreciated by most critics, taking its rightful place in the new generation of tapes about the history of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, released after 2010. It is not as "cheeky" as The Wolf of Wall Street, although not as analytical as the strictly documentary Insiders, while maintaining a balance with an entertaining start. James Berardinelli singled out the "surgical precision" with which the creators expose the internal mechanisms that led to the disaster. A serious, analytical analysis of the crisis ends with an open ending, unusual for modern feature films. The main characters won their bets, but they won at the expense of the common people. Those who can conditionally be classified as "scoundrels" remained unpunished.
The achievement of The Big Short, however, is that Mr. McKay does more than emphasize the moral of the story with dialogue. The ending of the picture, with its abrupt change of tone from a sigh of relief to a sigh of disappointment and an unexpected change in the mood of the music to a gloomy ... all together create a wave of almost unbearable disgust
Original text (English)
but the achievement of “The Big Short” is that Mr. McKay doesn't only underline the moral of the story in dialogue. The film’s final images, its abrupt shift in tone from exhilaration to exhaustion, its suddenly downbeat music … all combine to trigger a climactic wave of almost unbearable disgust .
Anthony Scott
The film is woven from contradictions that begin with the original title of the picture, containing an oxymoron. The main events are developing temperamentally and at a high pace. Difficult to understand the actions of the characters, playing on the stock exchange, references to financial instruments are interspersed with episodes from the personal lives of the characters, inserts of a kind of "white noise" of modern pop music, cuts of clips. Critic Anthony Scott (NY Times) compared the film's plot to a psychedelic trip. The find of the creators is the stops in the torn narrative, when the characters suddenly stop and through the "fourth wall" turn to the audience: "but in fact it was not quite like that." The cameraman takes an unusual approach, stylized as an amateur shoot, albeit without the fashionable shaking camera. The focus in the mise-en-scene is constantly shifting from one character to another, suddenly there is a collision, as if the cameraman has not decided what to show him.
The main difficulty faced by the creators is the need to convey complex economic concepts, without which it is impossible to understand the intrigue of the picture, to an unprepared viewer. "Bonds aren't particularly photogenic," but the filmmakers did their best. They had to look for a non-standard approach, so that "The Big Short" did not turn into a boring lecture on economics. The guest stars explain how secondary financial instruments work using simple analogies: a bubble bath (financial bubble), a second freshness fish soup (a portfolio of securities with different ratings) and a casino game (bets on CDOs) (Margot Roby, Selena Gomez, Anthony Bourdain, Richard Thaler). Individual negative reviews deserve excessive moralizing in the comments, as well as excessive pathos in the ending, in which the authors present the moral of the picture without any allegory.
The central characters can formally be attributed to goodies, but the viewer does not feel sympathy for them - they are just cold-blooded businessmen. The picture has a happy ending, all the leading characters remained in profit, but the viewer experiences conflicting feelings. According to the NY Daily News critic, the main characters are representatives of a rare class of likable villains. The ensemble cast deserved, in general, high marks. All the actors of the central characters managed to create memorable characters. Critics highlighted the game of Steve Carell, who created a deep image of Mark Baum, who feels moral responsibility for everything that happens.
Awards
Prize | Category | Nominees | Result |
---|---|---|---|
Oscar | Best movie | Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Brad Pitt | Nomination |
Best Director | Adam McKay | Nomination | |
Best Supporting Actor | Christian Bale | Nomination | |
Best Adapted Screenplay | Adam McKay and Charles Randolph | Victory | |
Best Editing | Hank Corwin | Nomination | |
American Editors Association Award | Best Editing of a Comedy or Musical Feature Film | Hank Corwin | Victory |
10 best films of the year | The Big Short | Victory | |
Casting Society Award | Big Budget - Comedy | Francine Maisler and Meagan Lewis | Victory |
BAFTA | Best movie | Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Brad Pitt | Nomination |
Best Director | Adam McKay | Nomination | |
Best Adapted Screenplay | Victory | ||
Best Supporting Actor | Christian Bale | Nomination | |
Best Editing | Hank Corwin | Nomination | |
Critics' Choice Movie Awards | Best movie | The Big Short | Nomination |
Best Comedy | The Big Short | Victory | |
Best Editing | Hank Corwin | Nomination | |
Best Comedy Actor | Christian Bale | Victory | |
Steve Carell | Nomination | ||
Adam McKay and Charles Randolph | Victory | ||
Best Acting Ensemble | Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Melissa Leo, Hamish Linklater, John Magaro, Brad Pitt, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Marisa Tomei, Finn Wittrock | Nomination | |
Directors Guild of America Award | Best Director | Adam McKay | Nomination |
Empire | Best Screenplay | Adam McKay and Charles Randolph | Victory |
golden globe | Best Film - Comedy or Musical | The Big Short | Nomination |
Best Actor - Comedy or Musical | Christian Bale | Nomination | |
Steve Carell | Nomination | ||
Best Screenplay | Adam McKay and Charles Randolph | Nomination | |
Hollywood Film Awards | directorial breakthrough | Adam McKay | Victory |
Houston Film Critics Society Awards | Best movie | The Big Short | Nomination |
Indiana Film Journalists Association Awards | Best movie | The Big Short | Nomination |
Best Director | Adam McKay | Nomination | |
Best Adapted Screenplay | Adam McKay and Charles Randolph | Runner up | |
Christian Bale | Nomination | ||
Steve Carell | Nomination | ||
Los Angeles Film Critics Association | Best Editing | Hank Corwin | Victory |
MTV Movie Awards | Movie based on real events | The Big Short | Nomination |
US National Board of Film Critics Award | Best cast | Victory | |
Producers Guild of America Award | Best Theatrical Motion Picture | Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and Brad Pitt | Victory |
San Francisco Film Critics Circle | Best Film Editing | Hank Corwin | Nomination |
Satellite | Best movie | The Big Short | Nomination |
Best Supporting Actor | Christian Bale | Victory | |
US Screen Actors Guild Award | Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role | Christian Bale | Nomination |
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture | Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Melissa Leo, Hamish Linklater, John Magaro, Brad Pitt, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Marisa Tomei, and Finn Wittrock | Nomination | |
USC Scripter Award | Best Adapted Screenplay | Adam McKay and Charles Randolph | Victory |
Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association | Best cast | Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Melissa Leo, Hamish Linklater, John Magaro, Brad Pitt, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Marisa Tomei, and Finn Wittrock | Victory |
Writers Guild of America Award | Best Adapted Screenplay | Adam McKay and Charles Randolph | Victory |
Essence of the deal
The main intrigue is built around the fact that the main character builds a fairly accurate forecast for the price of MCB, since the financial pyramid built on these securities will collapse sooner or later. He bets against securities that were considered the foundations of the market. The practice of issuing subprime loans () with a floating rate () without proper credit history checks has become widespread. Consolidation of risky securities into CDO tranches that are not properly rated. Watching even more risky, so-called synthetic CDOs appear on the market, the heroes only become convinced that they are right.
Michael Bury and other traders in the film, like in a casino or a bookmaker, bet on a fall in prices, that is, "down", playing on the stock exchange on the side of the bears. The mechanism used in a short game is the reverse of the usual speculative reselling of securities. A trader who knows that the price will fall borrows securities from a broker, sells them in the market and waits for the price to fall. When the price finally drops, he buys them and keeps the difference (closes the trade). It is beneficial for the trader to do this when the price falls to the lowest level.
Bury could have directly purchased the shares (and he did not carry out the transaction with his own money, but with the funds of his fund's clients), but he used the credit default swap (CDS) mechanism. This derivative insures the deal. In this case, the buyer (Bury) does not pay the entire amount of the purchased securities, but only the increase in the price of the subject of the transaction, if it occurs (the so-called premiums). The bank that provided the CDS is confident that the price of the securities will not fall, and agrees (in reality, CDS in relation to mortgage-backed securities did not exist on the market and only arose after Bury showed interest in them). The risk is that if the price of securities rises instead of falling, then under the terms of the contract he will constantly have to cover the difference and he will not have enough cash. This is what Michael Bury's hedge fund clients are worried about. As a result, all the expenses of Bury and other players for a fall are justified. Bury returned the investment with a profit of 489%. It is also noteworthy that Bury turned to Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs for the CDS deal. He took into account the fact that many financial institutions would suffer from the crisis and not be able to pay it off - the banks he chose were not so closely connected with the mortgage securities market and, most likely, would have remained afloat.
Reliability and significance
Michael Lewis believed that the appearance of a film based on such a difficult book is an opportunity to convey to a wider audience the important lessons that everyone should learn from the recent crisis.
It is not enough to explain complex concepts to the reader, the reader must want to understand them. If the concepts are very complex, it should be vital for the reader to understand them.
Original text (English)
It's never enough to explain complicated things to a reader; the reader needs first to want to know about them. If the thing is seriously complicated, the reader must very badly want to know about it
Michael Bury noted that the film told only about a small part global problem. Financial commentator Holman Jenkins has been critical of the picture, noting that big banks have so-called "toxic" mortgage assets, amounted to only about 2% of the entire portfolio, and these assets alone were not enough to deal such a blow to the system. The myopia depicted in the picture of the media, which, having colluded with banks, did not notice the impending disaster, does not correspond to reality. The Wall Street Journal and other publications have been writing about the inflating bubble since 2004. Forbes columnist Steve Danning, arguing with colleagues, noted the high reliability of the film, correctly placed accents. Films like this increase vigilance and draw attention to what used to be in the shadows.
Notes
- Anne Thompson. REVIEW: "The Big Short" Is Smart Expose of Financial Meltdown(English) . Indiewire. Penske Business Media, LLC (December 11, 2015). Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- The Big Short (2015)(English) . Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Retrieved January 30, 2016.
- The Deadline Team. Paramount Taps ‘Anchorman’ Helmer Adam McKay To Adapt And Direct Michael Lewis’ ‘The Big Short’ About Economic Meltdown(English) . deadline (March 24, 2014). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Dave McNary. 'Anchorman's' Adam McKay Boards Financial Drama(English) . Variety (Mar 24, 2014). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Boris Kit. Steve Carell in Talks to Join Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling in "The Big Short" (Exclusive)(English) . Hollywood Reporter (1/14/2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Michael Lewis. Even Michael Lewis Was Surprised Hollywood Bet on The Big Short(English) . Vanity Fair (Jan 2016). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- by Nick Allen. People are smart: Adam Mckay on "The Big Short"(English) . Roger Ebert (Dec 14, 2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Rebecca Ford. How Adam McKay Managed to Write and Wrangle Stars for "The Big Short"(English) . Hollywood Reporter (11/8/2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Matt Belloni. "The Big Short" Stars, Director Gather to Debate Wall Street, Trump and Hillary vs. Bernie(English) . Hollywood Reporter (Dec 02, 2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Brianne Hogan. Banking on The Big Short(English) . creative screenwriting (Jan 20, 2016). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Mike Scott. Brad Pitt's "Big Short" to shoot in New Orleans, with Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Steve Carell co-starring(English) . nola (Feb 11, 2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- AVJ. The Big Short (2015): Top 10 Facts About The Movie(English) . mdft (Dec 17, 2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Staff. Barry Ackroyd zooms in on The Big Short(English) . panavision (05/22/2016). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Bryan Alexander. Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt go full un-hot in "Big Short"(English) . USA Today (Dec 20, 2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Kenneth Turan. Review "The Big Short" somehow makes the "08 housing collapse entertaining(English) . Los Angeles Times (10 Dec 2015). Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- Staff.
The Big Short [The Secret Springs of Financial Disaster] Michael Lewis
Prologue Poltergeist
Prologue
Poltergeist
It remains a mystery to me to this day that a Wall Street investment bank would pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars for my investment advice. As a 24-year-old, I had no experience at the time in forecasting the ups and downs of stocks and bonds. Yes, and there was no particular desire to do this either. Wall Street's most important function was to allocate capital, in other words, to decide who got the money and who didn't. And believe me, I didn't know much about any of this. Neither accounting education, nor experience in managing a company - there were no own savings that could be disposed of. In 1985, by pure chance, I got into Salomon Brothers, and in 1988 I left there a much wealthier person. And although I have written a whole book about my work at the company, everything that has happened so far seems ridiculous to me - and this is one of the reasons why I gave up money so easily. My position seemed too precarious to me. Sooner or later, someone would lead me, as well as many others like me, to clean water. Sooner or later, the hour of the great reckoning would come, Wall Street would awaken from its sleep and drive out of the financial industry hundreds, if not thousands, of youngsters like me who had no right to risk other people's money or convince other people to risk them.
My experience, Liar's Poker, was told from the perspective of a young man who washed his hands in time. It was as if I had scribbled and bottled a note for those who would follow in my footsteps in the distant future. If all these events are not recorded on paper by their direct participant, I thought, no one in the future will believe that such a thing could ever happen.
Everything that has been written about Wall Street up to that point has dealt primarily with the stock market. From the beginning, Wall Street has focused on the stock market. My book, on the other hand, dealt primarily with the bond market, as Wall Street made much more money at the time by bundling, selling, and manipulating growing US debt. This situation, in my opinion, could not last forever. I felt like I was writing about a bygone era, the 1980s, when the American people lost their financial sanity. I expected readers of the future to be horrified to learn how in 1986, Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund, who received $ 3.1 million, almost ruined the company. I thought they'd be startled by the story of Howie Rubin, the Salomon Brothers mortgage-bond trader who went to Merrill Lynch and immediately inflicted a $250 million loss on the company. a vague idea of the colossal risk their traders are taking.
This is the picture I painted; but the fact that after reading my story and my reminiscences, readers would say: “How interesting,” I could not even imagine. How naive of me! Not for a second could I imagine that the 1980s would drag on for another two decades in the world of finance, or that the quantitative gap between Wall Street and the real economy would eventually grow into a qualitative one. That a trader can make $47 million a year and feel left out. That the mortgage bond market, which started out on the floor of Salomon Brothers and seemed like a great idea at the time, would turn out to be one of the biggest financial disasters in history. That exactly 20 years after Howie Rubin was embarrassed nationwide by embezzling $250 million, another trader from Morgan Stanley, also named Howie, will lose $9 billion on a single trade. And yet only a narrow circle of people in the company itself will know what he did and why.
When I started working on the first book, I did not set myself global tasks, but just wanted to tell the world an exciting, from my point of view, story. But if, after giving me a drink or two, you were curious about what effect this book would have on readers, I would say something along the lines of: “I hope it will fall into the hands of college students who cannot decide on their careers; they will read it, understand that it is not worth making money on fraud and deceit, and give up the fiery or timid dream of becoming financiers. I cherished the hope that some wunderkind at Ohio State University with a dream of being an oceanographer would read my book, turn down an offer from Goldman Sachs, and sail the seas.
However, my hopes were not justified. Six months after the publication of Liar's Poker, I was inundated with letters from students at Ohio State University, eager to see if I had any other Wall Street secrets in store. My book became their guide to action.
Twenty years after leaving the company, I waited for the end of the Wall Street I knew was about to come. Extraordinary bonuses, an endless string of fraudulent traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and led to the decline of Salomon Brothers, the crisis that followed the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, which was owned by my former boss John Meriwether, soap bubble of internet companies. The financial system has discredited itself again and again. Yet the big Wall Street banks, mired in scandals up to their ears, continued to rise, as did the fees they paid 26-year-olds for socially useless work. The uprising of American youth against money culture never happened. Why overthrow the world of parents when it can be bought and sold piece by piece?
Finally, I gave up waiting. No scandal or failure can destroy this system, I concluded.
And then Meredith Whitney appears on the scene with her statement. On October 31, 2007, Whitney, an obscure financial analyst at an obscure financial firm Oppenheimer & Co., became known to the whole world. On that day, she predicted that if Citigroup, which was in a very deplorable state, did not cut its dividend drastically, it would face imminent bankruptcy. Causal relationships in the stock market are not amenable to unambiguous interpretation, but it could be clearly stated that the forecast made by Meredith Whitney on October 31 led to a collapse in the stock market. By the end of the trading day, exactly as predicted by the woman few knew existed, Citigroup stock fell 8% and the US stock market lost $390 billion. Four days later, Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince resigned. Two weeks later, the bank reduced the amount of dividends.
From that moment on, Meredith Whitney became a figure whose authority could not be ignored. She said she was taken care of. And her advice was simple. Want to know the real value of Wall Street companies? Take a closer look at the questionable assets that were borrowed to buy, and imagine what they would get for them in the event of an urgent sale. All these crowds of highly paid workers are not worth, in her opinion, a broken penny. Throughout 2008, to the statements of bankers and brokers that they had solved their difficulties with the help of write-offs and capital raising, she answered the same thing: “You are wrong! You still do not understand how illiterately you manage your company. You still refuse to recognize billions of dollars in losses on subprime mortgage bonds. The value of your securities is as illusory as the qualifications of your people." Whitney's opponents have argued that she is grossly overrated; bloggers said that she was just lucky. Yes, her predictions came true. But she really relied heavily on her intuition. How could she have known what would happen to Wall Street companies, or what losses they would incur in the subprime mortgage market, when even the CEOs didn't know. "It's either that or they're all lying," Meredith said, "but I don't think they really knew anything."
Of course, it wasn't Meredith Whitney who killed Wall Street. She only clearly and loudly expressed her point of view, which in the end turned out to be much more destructive for the situation in society than the numerous campaigns against corruption on Wall Street conducted by New York prosecutors. If an ordinary scandal could wipe out Wall Street's investment banks, they would have ceased to exist a long time ago. This woman did not say a word about the corruption of the bankers. She reproached them for their stupidity. As it turned out, people whose direct duties included managing other people's capital could not properly manage even their own funds.
I confess that the thought does not leave me that, if I did not quit the company, the blame for this catastrophe could well lie on my shoulders. My former colleagues from Salomon Brothers were involved in the collapse of Citigroup; I have attended corporate training courses with some of them. In March 2008, I called Meredith Whitney. Our conversation took place shortly before the bankruptcy of the investment bank Bear Stearns, when its fate hung in the balance. If she's right, I thought then, then the end of the financial world as it has existed since the 1980s is near. I wanted not only to understand how meaningful her predictions were, but also to learn more about the woman whose every word was a nail in the stock market's coffin.
The Brown University graduate began her career on Wall Street in 1994. “When I arrived in New York, I didn’t even know there was such a field as analytical research,” she recalls. At first she was lucky enough to get a job at Oppenheimer & Co., and then a rare luck awaited her: studying under the guidance of a man who participated not only in her career, but also in shaping her worldview. His name was Steve Eisman. “The best thing that happened to me after talking to Citigroup management was a call from Steve who said he was proud of me.” Since I had never heard of Steve Eisman before, her words did not make much of an impression on me.
And then I learned on the news that a little-known hedge fund manager named John Paulson had made about $20 billion for investors and pocketed nearly $4 billion. Before that, no one on Wall Street could make that kind of money so quickly. What's more, he got them playing against the same subprime mortgage bonds that failed Citigroup and many of Wall Street's other big investment banks. These investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: they determine the probability. A client who tries to play a zero-sum game against them wins only occasionally, but not systematically, and certainly his winnings will keep the casino owners out of the world. Nevertheless, John Paulson was a Wall Street client. And we got an example of the same incompetence that Meredith Whitney made a name for herself by exposing. The casino miscalculated badly in determining its own odds, and it did not escape the eyes of at least one person. I called Whitney hoping to see if she knew anyone who had foreseen the subprime mortgage cataclysm and had managed to get their hands dirty with it. Who, before the casino realized it, managed to figure out that the roulette wheel began to spin with a predictable result? Who else, on the sidelines of the modern financial system, saw the broken cogs of its mechanism?
This happened at the end of 2008. At that time, many experts claimed that they foresaw the coming crisis, but there were far fewer real visionaries. And even fewer of those who had the courage to bet on their forecast. It's too hard to resist mass hysteria - not to be fooled by the financial news, to admit that powerful financiers are either lying or wrong - and not go crazy about it. Whitney named half a dozen names, mostly investors she could personally vouch for. John Paulson was mentioned on the list. And in the first place was Steve Eisman.
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I read another wonderful book the other day, and I want to recommend it to you - a new book by Michael Lewis, The Big Short. The Secret Springs of Financial Disaster" (English version - "The Big Short. Inside the Doomsday Machine", Michael Lewis)
Probably many of you have read the previous book by Michael Lewis - Liar's Poker, written twenty years ago based on real events and the author's personal experience, and revealing the underside of the financial world, in which financial companies defraud their customers. The book at one time made a lot of noise, became a bestseller, and in 2001 it was translated into Russian and published in Russia by the Olimp-Business publishing house. The book is no less fascinating, and I once read it with great pleasure. However, some dissatisfaction remains because she describes events in the United States more than twenty years ago. They passed by Russia, practically without arousing any interest - in the 80s, Russian readers had no time for foreign financial fraud, and hardly anyone understood the meaning of the term "mortgage bonds" (around which events unfold in the book).
And now, twenty years later, Michael Lewis wrote a new book, about recent events that directly affected the whole world - about the fresh mortgage crisis of 2007-2009. in the United States, which served as a trigger for the outbreak of a global crisis.
The book, I'm not afraid of this word, is gorgeous. Based on real events, Michael Lewis managed to create an exciting book of an incomprehensible genre - a mixture of financial thriller, detective story, documentary investigation, novel, and still it is not clear what. At the same time, the author combined things that are extremely rare to find together. On one side you will find detailed colorful descriptions of people, characters, environments, etc. at the level of a solid fiction novel (despite the fact that the book is essentially a documentary, with real names, company names, dates, etc.). On the other hand, the author extremely professionally describes the nuances of the financial world, which he is perfectly familiar with both from the inside and from numerous conversations and interviews conducted as part of a journalistic investigation.
The result is a breathtaking description of how the world came to the greatest crisis since the Great Depression.
The most interesting, perhaps, not even that. The most captivating thing about the book is that its protagonists are not the losers, but the winners. Those who profited from this crisis not only managed to see the problems of the financial system growing like a snowball, but also risked putting their money on its bankruptcy. If in "Liar's Poker" Michael Lewis rather exposed the greedy bankers, then in "The Big Short" he describes the situation through the eyes of the winners - those few people who eventually won by hitting the big jackpot in the big Game, and bringing such financial monsters to their knees. systems like AIG. Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and others. They were not the cause of the financial crisis, but they were able to see the growing problems in advance and take advantage of the situation.
In 2010, the book became a top seller worldwide and was named "Book of the Year" by dozens of authoritative ratings, including Amazon, The Economist and Bloomberg.
There is only one weighty fly in the ointment in this barrel of honey that needs to be mentioned. In the preface, the book is recommended for a general audience, but in my opinion, this is not entirely true. I would not recommend this book to everyone, but only to financially savvy readers. Despite the juicy descriptions of characters and details, this book is clearly not for the general public, not for housewives, since terms like "mortgage derivatives", "default swap" and the like appear regularly in it, go, by and large, without "chewing". If these words sound like complete gibberish to you, then you run the risk of simply not understanding what is at stake.
But if you have at least a general idea of the meaning of these words, then I think you will get great pleasure from reading this book.
There is another reason to buy this book - Alpina Publisher has now reduced the price of it. The book is now on sale on Ozone and in the publisher's store at a special price of 297 rubles. (its usual price is about 400 rubles).
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