Just watched The Big Short last night. Excellent movie. Also extremely depressing. I can't help but wonder if we're erecting another house of cards from the rubble.
SPOILER ALERT: (Do I even need to put this on a movie based on real life events...?) Lol I also watched it last night on Netflix with DW. I had to pause the movies several times to further explain some financial terms to her, but she found the movie entertaining. Knowing that it's based on a non-fiction event, it is still a movie for the purpose of entertainment, and I loved it.
Definitely some mustachian characteristics in Brad Pitt's character (the seeds, the ER, family), but also a little too tin-foily.
I thought it was very interesting that instead of showing a big celebration and payoff for the 3 firms in the end, the filmmakers shows the viewers how each firm was struggling with their own morals of profiting off the fraud, mistakes, and job/homes loses of millions of others. Whether this happen irl or not, I thought the juxtaposition was very effective storytelling.
Especially poignant was Brad Pitt tempering the excitement of his proteges and explaining that real lives were being adversely affected by the turn of events in the market.
I understand that is it a highly dramatized version of the events, but it entertained DW and myself for 2 hrs, and it gave us a little food for thought, which is all I look for in a Hollywood movie anyways.
Both DW and I graduated in 2008, and landed our first real grown-up jobs in summer/fall of that year, so we were too young and had too little money to have been affected by it. In fact, we have basically only lived through a bull market in our adult working lives, going on 7 years. A movie like this is hugely entertaining to me because I never experienced it firsthand, and wonder how we would truly react if another downturn came.
Thinking about it, we were lucky that our life stages just happened to market-time for us. I didn't start contributing to my 401k until around Jan 09, and I think I did it at first just for the company match. And houses were more reasonable and mortages low when we were ready to buy a few years down the line.