Having worked in the financial market industries for quite some years, both Cynthia and I found the movie “Margin Call” pretty realistic. There are moments in the movies when we chuckled at the rather private jokes (OK, maybe not that private, but we have not worked in other industries for long to be frank). And there are many moments we can relate, and are emotionally moved.
Subprime crisis is brutal. It brought many giants down to their knees. It is also an humbling experience. However good the time now is and however successful we think we are, there is always an unknown force out there to hit us. We could blame the investment bankers for the things that they did leading to the subprime crisis. But ultimately, it is the greed of the nations that escalate the issue. We want maximum return with the least investment we put in. And there are people out there who earn big bucks to deliver just that. I am often puzzled by how we manage to package financial securities into exotic products that even the distributors may not have a thorough idea on what they are, and sell them. It seems to me that no matter how much we learn from past lessons, no matter how sophisticated our risk management system has become, greed will eventually find a loophole somewhere. And the cycle will repeat itself.
While “Margin Call” triggers my thought in the above written paragraph, the movie delivers more than that. For a start, it takes us all the way to the evening before subprime crisis hit the world. The filmmakers have brought in a panel of talented actors (minus Penn Badgley from my favorite series Gossip Girl) to fill up the key roles. It is mesmerizing to watch Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Simon Baker, Demi Moore, and Jeremy Irons playing different roles within the firm. Each has his or her unique perspective to share. Some lines can be thought provoking. In fact, the entire movie is thought provoking. What am I doing with my life?!
Joke aside, today has been a physically demanding day for us. We woke up early, on our holiday, and took my mother to Ubin Island. My sister and her husband wanted to join, so we have a 2-year old baby with us too. In retrospect, I am not sure if Ubin Island is baby-friendly. We had a good time nonetheless. I will share the photos with a write-up once I get down to doing it.
Ever since my mother is in town, Cynthia and I have not caught up with our movie partner TK for a movie outing. So I picked “Margin Call” to celebrate our year end. It is the 33rd movie Cynthia and I have watched this year. And yes, I still want to watch “Mission Impossible”, although Cynthia is not that into Tom Cruise no more.
2 replies on “Margin Call – “It Is Just Money””
Interesting. I used to crack my head trying to understand margin calls. Put a few clever and greedy people together and you get the exotic products.
Many months ago I read a book called 50 decision models and one of them talks about a Black Box model that says as out world gets more and more sophisticated, the power of persuasion is more prevalent than trying to explain how a piece of equipment works. So for example, we don’t actually know how the insides of the computer works (although I do, because I used to study them in more details), or how an ipad works but many people bought into the gadgets because of believing that it works.
It is about how more and more people have to rely on their oratory skills to market and sell rather than trying to get your consumers to understand the mechanism of how it should work.
Anyway, I thought that’s the result that we see today. Using debt to make more money, sounds fishy but with the $$$ dangling in front of many people, who cares?
Also, do you think we get older we fall out with our teenage idols? 😉
Amelia – You rightly point out the black box model. Things do get more complex. I suppose you can always compare, say, a jumbo jet and a financial derivative. Both are like a black box. One has a far reaching effect should a disaster occurs.
On using debt to make money, who should care? I think at the minimal, regulators should.