Freebies on offer, roll up, roll up!

Iâve been doing well this week â first Stuart Fairneyâs book arrived in the post, then an advance copy of a riveting DVD. âInside Jobâ.
It genuinely is a riveting DVD; itâs well made, fast moving, informative, a thoroughly professional film as you would expect from an Oscar winning film maker â Charles Ferguson.
120 minutes, âas gripping as any thrillerâ (did I just quote the Guardian!!!) it aims to impress as a âwarts and allâ look at the disastrous financial tsunami which has swept over the world.
My gripe is that some of the warts only made an appearance when they could be shown in a favourable light, the opposing view, which a balanced documentary should have, sought recourse to a few foreign warts to pad out the scenes.
As a keen political observer, I found that I was screaming at the screen as often as I do at the news on the BBC.
The film is heavy on the âbash the bankersâ front. There is a longish section on the rewards available to bankers â the yachts, the private planes, the estates on the Hamptonâs, are given the benefit of lingering salivating footage. The prostitution, the cocaine consumption is dealt with thoroughly; interviews, depositions, and the essential shot of supra-naturally high heels and comely ankles pounding a night time street.
The film starts with one of the âforeign wartsâ â a ten minute section on how Iceland deregulated its banking system and the disasters that followed. Beyond that, deregulation barely gets a mention beyond being something that Ronald Reagan âstartedâ- those damn Republicans â and Obama, now post apocalypse, is definitely in favour of!
It fails signally to mention that Obama, and Clinton, was only too happy to lobby for the relaxation of the Glass-Seagal Act which gave his voter base the opportunity to buy an all American home (one of my earliest posts!) for a mere handful of dollars down and no questions asked.
Once upon a time, banks were started by wealthy industrialists. They used their own money. Naturally they were rather keen to see that not only did they get their money back, but they made a profit on it. They took a long hard look at the people who wanted to borrow money and if they didnât like what they saw, they didnât lend them anything.
The banking industry had been seeking the repeal of the 1933 GlassâSteagall Act since the 1980s, if not earlier. Of course they were. Drug dealers have been seeking the repeal of Narcotics laws. Fishermen want the repeal of fishing quotas. It was Clinton who bowed to their demands with the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999.
Neither bankers nor regulators âmakeâ the law, politicians do that. Whilst the film spent a long time exploring the âback storyâ of the Regulators â surprise, surprise, they all turned out to have previously held high positions in the banking industry; what did they expect? Professional Fishermen? Deep Sea Divers? There was very little, seconds if that, of the role that Politicians played in all this.
No exploration of why they wanted deregulation â what was in it for them â Obama, Gordon Brown?
As far as this film was concerned, there was only one guilty party â the bankers, ably abetted by the regulators who were ex-bankers. As though they operated in a void.
If you get a job as a double glazing salesman, and you earn 10% of every sale you make â do you stop when you have reached what you think is a âmoral levelâ of remuneration? Do you reflect on the problems you may be storing up in the developing world when all those plastic windows end up in land fill? Do you Hell! You sell as much as you have the energy to do so, and enjoy your good fortune while it lasts.
Quite why it is so popular amongst a particular political persuasion to blame the salesmen and not the politicians who changed the law to permit the product to go on sale is beyond me. Bankers are salesmen; they will sell whatever they are allowed to sell.
None of which should take away from the fact that this is an excellent film, that will explain the complex financial instruments used in a most enjoyable and accessible way.
It went on sale yesterday at http://www.sonypictures.co.uk/ for £19.99. âInside Jobâ.
No, I havenât been paid for writing this, but since they were kind enough to send me a free copy, it seemed only polite to let them know what I thought of it.
So â who would like to watch it next? I have a copy sitting on my deskâ¦..
Last commentator gets itâ¦.Dutch auction!
June 15, 2011 at 10:57
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Anna, your comment is slipping!
June 15, 2011 at 10:56
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It is simply the elite getting on with their enrichment while promoting a
centralised consensus of control. Something along the lines of an elegant and
elitist, modernised Frankfurt School.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
This film,
of course, being part of the obfuscation/inversion. As is everything that gets
published in the consensus-controlled media.
June 15, 2011 at 05:04
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They came on to get all the freebies
It was better than watching
C-Beebies
Now itâs me on the thread
Which âoft kills it dead
Iâll win
if I cause heeby-jeebies
June 14, 2011 at 22:39
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Iâve worked in banking for a couple of years now. Iâve yet to see any
cocaine or prostitutes, but we did go out for a pub lunch once.
June 14, 2011 at 20:42
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Bankers and regulators are pretty much the same guys wearing different
hats.
Waving big sticks at themselves for being such greedy bankers while
their state/regulator personas nationalise large chunks of the
economy.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
I think if one looks at was has been
achieved (more state intervention, effective nationalisation of banks,
financial institutions, car manufacturers, impoverishment of middle and lower
middle class, devaluation of currency by printing zillions, enrichment of said
printers, etc, etc) one can get a fairly good idea of what it was all
about.
June 14,
2011 at 20:31
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Thereâs a really simple answer going forward.
Banks shouldnât be allowed to sell on or in any way insure their lending.
So if someone defaults, the bank picks up the tab â thatâd make the greedy
bastards a bit more careful â¦. especially if bonuses were reduced when losses
were incurred.
June 14, 2011 at 17:37
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âDiamond Mortgages came round the door todayâ said my friend, on incapacity
benefit, living in a council house â I guess that was about four years ago,
maybe longer. âDonât even think of itâ I said. My friend is genuinely ill with
heart problems, diabetes, and a multitude of other ills. But like so many he
wanted to better himself, own a home rather than rent from the council.
I talked him out of it â although he protested that they had told him being
on benefits ws no problem and that they could deduct the payments from his
benefits.
Well, he didnât go ahead â others on that council estate did (although I
have no idea whether it was with the same company.) All I know is that those
who bought their council homes on that estate have all been re-possessed â
evicted through being unable to keep up the payments, pushed even further into
debt than they probably already were. So much for helping the poor !
June 14,
2011 at 16:46
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In many cases a mortgage is no dearer than paying rent, so people will go
for that option. Itâs worth a gamble because if it all crumbles to dust after
a few years they can walk away leaving the bank with the repossessed house,
they âlostâ their money but would have been paying it in rent anyhow.
(This
could be a very long thread)
June 14, 2011 at 16:05
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Before we start to slag off the people who borrowed the money letâs
consider a few points.
The average person could be forgiven for putting their trust in bank
employees, after all thay are supposed to be the experts. If they say you can
have it, then why question it.
After years off not being able to get on the
housing ladder, here was a golden opportunity. Not everyone is a financial
expert, therefore you rely on people who are supposedly better placed to
advise you. In fact this works in most walks of life, whether it be, Doctors,
Lawyers, Mechanics etc.
June 14, 2011 at 15:52
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+1
June 14, 2011 at 14:46
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Last commentator gets it?
This could run and run!
June 14, 2011 at 13:02
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I also thought it was a good film, though again a bit incomplete. For
example, there is no mention of the thousands of people who actually took out
the mortgages that they were never, realistically, going to be able to repay.
Certainly, the banks shouldnât have been lending them in the first place and
the assorted Governments shouldnât have let the banks bundle them all up and
sell them on as if they were sound investments, but at the same time, youâve
got to be a bit of a berk to borrow 6 or 7 times your income to fund 100% or
more of the purchase price of your house and think that everything is going to
be just groovy.
That being said, those people were just a bit dumb. The bankers were evil,
corrupt, greedy bastards, and I think thatâs an important distinction. As far
a politicians letting them do it, I remember it being mentioned in the film a
bit more than you refer to it, but it was awful selective, and it didnât
mention that governments all over the world were deregulating and not just the
US were doing it.
June 14, 2011 at 13:40
June 14, 2011 at 13:47
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ââ¦youâve got to be a bit of a berk to borrow 6 or 7 times your income to
fund 100% or more of the purchase price of your houseâ¦â
What would be a
better choice to make?
Most of us have to do our best in the financial
climate we are in, and if irresponsible lending and borrowing have pushed up
prices to the point where you can only buy by borrowing irresponsibly, you
have little coice but to go along with it.
June 14, 2011 at 13:00
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Presumably the DVD wonât go to this bunny but will make sure I watch it all
the same.
Nice little job that politicians did blaming the âfinancial crisisâ and
appealing to the politics of envy and a wish to blame bankers for all that
went wrong. Canât blame them for doing what politicians do, but the
âderegulation caused the crashâ line is more misplaced conventional
wisdom.
The reason the financial sector became utterly reckless is beacause
governments in the US and UK in particular egged them on and therefore tied
themselves into clearing up any resulting mess. If the banks had been told
that they were on their own in the event of a meltdown would they have started
to lend more responsibly? And would we be where we are now?
http://outspokenrabbit.blogspot.com/
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