Wall Street movies and documentaries

Inside Job is a documentary by director Charles Ferguson – a onetime software entrepreneur and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution – that explores the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and features interviews with people to which Ferguson was granted extraordinary access. This list includes former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, former New York State Attorney General (and disgraced governor) Eliot Spitzer, and legendary investor George Soros, to name a few.
Perhaps the best summation of the film’s point comes from Ferguson himself, who told the Wall Street Journal, “I think the central argument is that deregulation, which began in the 1980s, led to the rise of what has, without any exaggeration, given rise to a criminal industry. American finance has become a criminal industry, particularly investment banking.
“The secondary thesis of the film is that as this industry has grown more powerful and wealthy, it has corrupted the institutions and people who should have retrained it – obviously the political system, the regulatory system, and, less obviously but equally important, the academic and research discipline of economics.”
Satyajit Das, a Minyanville contributor who appears in the film, agrees. The longtime financial derivatives expert and author of Traders, Guns and Money, says one of his favorite moments in the film is when Ferguson "exposes the participation of prestigious academics, who provided the age of money with seductive economic credibility. Harvard's Martin Feldstein and Columbia University's Glenn Hubbard earned large consulting fees from financial institutions. Confronted on camera, Feldstein glowered, squirmed, and smiled, in the words of one reviewer, 'like Yoda with a hemorrhoid.'"
For Das, the moral of the movie 
is this: "Trust no one with your money, including yourself. Most experts don't know what they are talking about and generally have so many conflicts of interest they develop mental conditions making them incomprehensible and financially illiterate except when calculating their own bonuses." --

Full text 
Comment: What has happened over the past decades is the criminalization of Wall Street, the corruption of economics, and the cultivation of greed that has not been good for America. Some ruthless profiteers have put their own short-term interests above prudence. They have exploited the naivitee of the ordinary American. People like Rubin, Summers and Greenspan and Co. and their academic cheeleaders have produced an economic and financial wasteland that will remain barren for decades to come.