chrislaucn
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2024
2:09 · 3.1M views · Dec 29, 2011
A two-minute clip from the film Margin Call in which Will Emerson talks about how banks and traders operate and why they stay necessary. The uploader posted it because they agree with the speech.
HN cites it as a compact explanation of the housing crash and of institutions keeping their fingers on the scales.
3 comments from Hacker News
Housing market got destroyed by people not paying back their loans. Assigning this to be a moral responsibility of banks and regulators is simplistic and naive. I had to search for this excellent clip from Margin Call, which explains this better than I could: this video
I wonder how this strategy is affected by the 2008 experience. You see, back then all sorts of, frankly, illegal measures were used to prevent those who bet against the housing market to cash out. Markets were frozen, contracts and even stocks artificially priced, for most investors right until the contracts were worthless due to bankruptcy, as pointed out in "the Big Short". Yes, VERY few investors did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time and got lucky. [LINK] Wall Street outright lied to offload known crashed investments to unsuspecting buyers. Again, this is obviously highly illegal. Nobody got punished, we can argue about why not, but one can remark it would have seriously affected the government. [LINK] It would have made both parties unelectable for a century because Will Emerson would have been forced "to take his hand off the scale". this video (second part of this clip, after 1m05s) The banks will not play fair. This can be proven by pointing out that they simply can't. If they make profits, they get those out of the company rapidly, and by design, the system cannot pay out the contracts it underwrites beyond a minimal "safety margin". They simply cannot cover the contracts they underwrite in the event of a crash, they don't have the money. You'd have to hope that the FED covers those contracts ... and ... not even if hell freezes over will they do so. And of course even this is ignoring real "black swan" events. Here's the thing: if a real meteor or comet
> On a lot of these issues I feel we're all stuck on some rollercoaster ride that almost no one really likes, but also no one really has the courage to stop. As Will Emerson says in Margin Call : "Jesus, Seth. Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you're necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin' houses they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin' fair really fuckin' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don't." [LINK] this video [LINK]