While watching this movie, about half of what I thought was "All is Lost was a better movie." Another quarter was "The Edge was a better movie" and the remaining 25% was split more or less evenly between "I wish I was watching Hateful 8 again" and "Hey that's kind of pretty."

I'd never heard of him before, but on a quick google, he looks a bit crazier than Lewis. You can write off pretty much anyone who tells you to invest in gold and silver for any reason other than "I think there's a panic-driven bubble kicking off, so buy now and sell soon." Someone who really thinks that the economy…

"I think the reader/viewer is supposed to say…"

The protagonists are part of the system that, generally, prevents similar frauds from happening on a regular basis. Most of participants in the securities markets are incentivized to take bullish views: companies are going to grow, debts are going to be paid, the economy is going to do great. Without shorting, the…

This is actually the opposite response from what the author wants. Your unmitigated disgust was his desired response.

That's a more serious response than my comment called for, but basically agreed. I was unfair to everyone for effect (except Johnny Depp, because seriously) but it's not exactly a miscarriage of justice that he won for Ray. Even if it was, he's earned it in other, less heralded roles.

What about Aviator? That was a great performance and his competition was Clint Eastwood as Desaturated Clint Eastwood, Johnny Depp as Period Whimsy, Don Cheadle in Oscar Bait Psyche It's About Africa Don't Care, and, the winner, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles Or Possibly Jamie Foxx's Generic Blind Routine From the Jamie…

I'm not sure I buy that. There is plenty of social utility to providing financing. There's less direct social utility to uncovering frauds, but uncovering frauds is a big part of the proper functioning of markets. In this case, no one listened when the fraud was uncovered, but that doesn't mean the activity itself…

That's pretty weak tea. Doctors are a pretty unethical profession, by that metric, while undertakers are absolute monsters.

??

So, the thing about the shorting in The Big Short is that you couldn't really do it the way you do classic short selling. That's why the two schmucks needed to get an ISDA (i.e. a contract that let them enter into complex derivative agreements with a large financial institution) in order to start shorting.

Futures are just "futures" or "futures contracts." Shares are only for equity (i.e. ownership interests) in legal entities, usually corporations. But you're right, that's a classic short—selling contracts you don't have and then buying and delivering later.

Wolf largely just gave up. For example, you could easily explain what an IPO scam is in under 30 seconds. Here, I'll do it:

This is the problem with Lewis's writing. He wrote Liar's Poker as an expose to the world: FINANCE IS A WASTE OF A LIFE, WITNESS THE VENALITY AND STUPIDITY, DO SOMETHING ELSE, and fully 50% of his readers (more among the young and male) read it and said "Hey, that looks like an exciting life, and the money! Mr.…

They were generally not very accurate, though. The Jenga tower, for example, has really nothing to do with how MBSs or CDOs work.

I don't really understand the morality point. The banks securitized fraudulent mortgages, pumping loads of investor cash out to scam artists (both brokers and, in some cases, buyers) and then offloading the resulting garbage onto other investors. The crash was going to come eventually. Shorting the packaged garbage…

The Big Short, like the book it is based on, is muckraking journalism. It's not really meant to entertain as much as it is to educate. Like muckraking journalism, it doesn't overly concern itself with accuracy, retention or even fundamental comprehension. The goal is to communicate that something bad happened, and…

GOOD IDEA: Shields of any kind
BAD IDEA: Torn t-shirts as armor

Eugene is not useless. He's one of the few survivors with non-hitting things skills, like basic chemistry. But, of course, Walking Dead exists in a universe where violence is the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems, and the vicissitudes of nature and needs of human settlement figure in at most once a…

Brutal slam.