With a tremendously and exceptionally piece of writing for the screen, The Big Short eloquently and tersely as well as excitingly lays out the nutshell of the financial Armageddon that was occurring in the fall of 2008 by giving us insights into the small players, of those that could barely fill out a baseball starting lineup, who saw what was going to transpire. Financial markets are curious in that wealth is reserved for those who have more information about the reality a price of a financial security corresponds to than those who do not. In essence, finance rewards those whose objective is to refine and continuously align price toward reality and not toward some illusory world. What is most shocking, then, to the surprise of the men who discovered the largest secret in financial history before anyone else, is that there is enough girth and momentum in the markets to enable the complete dissociation of price towards reality; where price becomes completely detached from what it is supposed to be an evaluation of in the physical world of home ownership in this instance. And even more devilishly, when the market makers of such financial products discover they are carrying quote dog shit wrapped in cat shit – again this is masterful screenwriting – they have the maneuverability and power to unload their worthless positions, essentially acting as rationally as possible which is to act toward socializing the risks their incompetency across society writ large. It is here, not so much the unabashed drive toward fortunes as it is in not suffering the consequences from poor behaviors in the bloodlust that riles people – as it should.

And the film wondrously exposes or rather attaches the financial trading of paperwork to the physical reality of innocent unsuspecting members of American society that have their lives upended because of a fractious segment of society which concerns itself only for material gluttony. And it does so without acting sanctimonious, as in, it is done gently and not deterring from the main plot line which is the thrill and the confusion of making the right bet and yet a delayed payout because the markets are rigged in favor of the underwriters of wealth management in capitalist society.

This is nourishment to the left-wing, to see rational self-interest in such a hideous manner, as a deformity of what it means to be an excellent human being. Indeed, it confirms their unconscientious anti-humanist bias, of if human beings are left to their own devices, they will rape one another. Never mind the fact that financial innovations have enabled greater and greater control of risk and therefore greater and greater access to credit markets as capitalism has evolved, essentially fulfilling the aims of democratizing the possibility of wealth creation away from the few and powerful well-connected to anyone with a sufficient base of capital and a sufficient participation in the credit markets to be deemed worthy of more capital access in the present. Never mind, in other words that the magnificent engine of wealth creation and abundance in written history has come from this organization of society and their resources leaps and beyond above the domestication of agriculture. All that is eminent and phenomenal is the emergence of the agglomeration of finance, which could only be possible with the integration of the government into the financial system with its command of credit markets enacted with the Federal Reserve in 1913.

It is only through this assurance of the prevention of failure can such mammoths of mammon endure themselves toward acting as greedily as possible at the expense of the rest of private society. It is, in other words, insufficient to claim the scale of the modern corporation and their credit demands correlates with such financial recklessness; the diversity of credit in the marketplace has necessarily been constricted because of its central commanded reduction, leading obviously toward greater incompetency, but worst of all, immunity from such stupidity when reality is confronted.

Grade: A+