Top 3 Films for the 2008 Crash

In our fourth video on Margin Call, we take a look at the “unofficial trilogy” of the 2008 Financial Crisis - The Big Short, Margin Call, and Too Big to Fail. As films, how does each one balance simplifying the financial crisis while showing its complexity?

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CHAPTERS
00:00 An Unofficial Trilogy?
1:27 The Big Short
2:06 Margin Call
3:00 Too Big to Fail
4:02 Simplicity
6:53 Complexity
9:12 SUBSCRIBE
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SOURCES

Movie posters from IMDB

Wikipedia was a huge help in looking at genres and for other sources about the movies!

Ann Thompson interview with Zachary Quinto and JC Chandor

John Thain photo

Description English: Richard S. Fuld, Jr.
Date 22 January 2007
Author World Resources Institute Staff

Wikipedia logo

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Margin Call 2011 movie
Margin Call Senior Partners Emergency Meeting
Margin Call First Meeting
Margin Call Peter discovers the firm's projected losses on MBS products
"It's just money. It's made up" - Margin Call
Margin Call - Fire Sale of Mortgage Bonds (Wall Street Investment Bank Trading)
Fire Sale - Margin Call
Eric Dale is fired - Margin Call
Margin Call - Searching for Eric Dale and Sam meets with Will
Margin Call - It didn't seem like much of a choice
Margin Call - Will Emerson talks about the impending financial turmoil
Margin Call - Fire Sale Pep Talk
Margin Call Best Quote by Will Emerson
Margin Call Seth Jared fired
Margin Call Ending
Margin Call Stanley Tucci Paul Bettany
Margin Call Sarah Robertson fired
Margin Call Will Emerson Jared Cohen parking garage
Margin Call Sarah Robertson Jared Cohen
Margin Call Zachary Quinto as Peter Sullivan
Margin Call Jeremy Irons as John Tuld
Margin Call Paul Bettany as Will Emerson
Margin Call Simon Baker as Jared Cohen
Margin Call Penn Badgley as Seth Bregman
Margin Call Demi Moore as Sarah Robertson
Margin Call Stanley Tucci as Eric Dale
Margin Call Aasif Mandvi as Ramesh Shah
Margin Call scene clip
Margin Call explained

The Big Short 2015 movie
The Big Short (2015) - Dr. Michael Burry Betting Against the Housing Market
The Big Short (2015) - Mark Baum (Steve Eisman) Meets a CDO Manager
The Big Short (2015) - Mark Baum: "I Say When We Sell!"
The Big Short: Dr M Burry suspects a housing bubble
The Big Short (2015) - Dr Michael Burry analyzes Subprime MBSs
The Big Short (2015) - Dr. Michael Burry Betting Against the Housing Market
The Big Short (2015) - Brownfield Fund "meeting" with JP Morgan Chase
The Big Short (2015) - Major Investor confronts Dr. Michael Burry
Christian Bale as Michael Burry
Steve Carell as Mark Baum
Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett
Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert
John Magaro as Charlie Geller
Finn Wittrock as Jamie Shipley
The Big Short scene clip
The Big Short explained

Too Big to Fail 2011 movie
Hank Paulson presents TARP to the big banks – Too Big to Fail (2011)
"Too Big to Fail" (2011) - Financial Crisis Explained
US Financial Collapse - the Reason
Lack of Credit Has The Power To Destroy The Economy
Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner
William Hurt as Henry Paulson
Paul Giamatti as Ben Bernanke
Topher Grace as Jim Wilkinson
Cynthia Nixon as Michele Davis
Ayad Akhtar as Neel Kashkari
Too Big to Fail scene clip
Too Big to Fail explained

[tonychan]

The best movie has to be margin call. Trust me it is so close to the truth both in terms of business as it is character wise. Believe me, i often rewatch this movie often in the presence of 1 or more of my former colleagues, each character we identify as someone we have worked with.

[punnyabrata]

Love all 3 movies but Margin Call is a different league of its own. It's among my top 10 movies of all time.

[jae_ster]

Margin Call has the best rewatch value. Both from an education standpoint and as a regular movie enjoyer standpoint, it delivers.

[markwhi]

Part 2? Yes please. All of the videos you've made on these films have been excellent. Thank you!

[AndreasSvenska]

Just after the 2008 Crash, I bought Gillian Tett’s book “Fools Gold”. I had read a riveting excerpt in the Financial Times. It was like an archiological dig of the whole story. So it described the internal structure of the failure of the Credit Market. A brilliant read. I saw Margin Call quite a while after, and thought it was great, because I thought it described the drama in the lives of people effected by the 2008 event; not knowing that the movie was necessarily related to the 2008 event. I will now watch all 3 movies with interest. I still find MS Tett’s book the most enlightening of the four works.

[DallasBurgher]

I liked all three but Margin Call is my favorite.

[slidefirst]

I knew a mortgage loan officer who went to prison for fraud over these issues, at the sentencing hearing, the federal judge asked the prosecutor why only small players were being pursued and the corporate executives went free.
So I would like to see a 4th film in which the executives, political trash and bureaucrats who caused the crisis were forced to walk the plank.

[chrisanderson]

To me Margin Call was the closest to reality but the Big Short explained it best to movie goers. I remember working at the regulator as a senior analyst at the time and being called up to the Commissioner's office and told "I need a prelim assessment of who is exposed by tomorrow". No pressure right. A fellow analyst and I spent hours racing through company financial filings and thinking "holy hell, none of the information they file with us is worth jack because none of these debts or "assets" (cough) are held in the shelf companies that do the filing, we're screwed". No data analytics or anything, they just picked the two of us because we were the most maths inclined amongst all the legal people and thought we could just create magic from scans of paper filings.

[CharlesCurran-mp]

I don’t know if any of these films admits that the beginning of the whole mess was politicians pressuring banks to give loans to marginalized groups who didn’t meet underwriting criteria. Combined with the greed of these institutions, all previous cautions were discarded in favor of fat commissions with no regard for creditworthiness. It was a tandem process with no heroes.

[vicdelta]

This is an excellent idea to view these films as a trilogy but it can be made into a tetralogy:
1. Margin Call : The Bank Side
2. The Big Short : The Investor Side
3. Too Big to Fail : The Govt. Side
4. Sorry We Missed You : The People Side.

[Shiryas]

Part 2 please. Once that is done dive into your 2nd or 3rd favorite films, I thoroughly enjoy your breakdown/critique and insights, cheers!

[merkury]

Margin call is my favorite, no disrespect to the others.

[jlasf]

I have told people to watch the first two, but forgot to add the third. Good call. The clearest explanation is the Jenga scene. It's very graphic and so simple a child could understand it - thus using a child's game. 

The best scene per pound is the boardroom scene. In particular Jeremy Irons, who gives a master class in acting. My favorite directorial moment is after he says, "Silence." Then, there is 15 seconds of....nothing. That is one of the hardest things to do in a movie. And it's probably the director's call. (It could be the editor.) Anyway, it's a brilliant moment in a great film.

[lsdigitalmedia]

Beautifully done. I have not watched Too Big to Fail, but have watched the other movies. I have to finish the trilogy. Thanks for producing this video.

[dansplain]

I work in finance. These are three of my favourite movies. You are brilliant.

[jamesoh]

Margin Call takes place in 2008. at 1:11:28 of the movie Eric Dale mentions building a bridge 22 years ago in 1986. You can say I love this movie.

[waynejones]

Another good movie covering the Financial Crisis is called "The Last Days of Lehman Brothers", which covers the last weekend of Lehman Brothers. There is a nice overlap of Too Big to Fail that gives a slightly different view of the events of this very important period in financial history.

[ash]

The world needs a fourth movie. A movie that explains two very weird entities: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Effectively government owned, but outside the US budget. They own mortgages that amount to about a *quarter* of US GDP. Yet, they are so independent that they were creating anti Congress ads every time Congress wanted to control them. We need a good explanation of how they came to be, what was their role in the 2008 crash.

[sidensvans]

They are all excellent . Margin Call was outstanding .

[dag]

In May 2007, I did a real estate convention, showing up in hemp flip flops, board shorts, a beater, a Corona bottle opener necklace, and sunglasses. After a few hours, I exited not wanting to be in real estate.

I had a gut feeling the party aspect of the convention was a pyramid scheme. Couple with high diesel prices and outrageous nature gas prices. I assumed inflation would continue to rise. I also knew a few people who lost their house due to the skyrocketing teasers mortgage rates. But most importantly, I do get FOMO.

I tossed out my real estate license study materials, took my seed money, and my entire stock portfolio. Then got drunk with heavy drug usage for about six months or so.

Choosing not to enter real estate in 2007 was a great idea and I don't remember much of the rest of that year.

I started to get the same feeling in May of 2021. Made bank on the correction in '22, but that feeling is still there, haunting me. What scares me the most is US Treasuries.