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5 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2018–2024
9:49 · 17M views · Nov 10, 2016
A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which senior partners hold an emergency meeting and decide to sell off toxic assets immediately. It is set at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.
HN cites the scene as a model of clear, decisive communication and of leaders acting fast to survive, and recommends the film as the best take on 2008.
9 comments from Hacker News
Right. You can't hide the detail with a wave of the hand, you can definitely overcommunicate detail that is unnecessary, but the art of it is finding a way to explain the bit that matters in a way that makes it clear to the users that you're eliding detail that isn't important, without misleading them. There is a very fine example of this in cinema -- the senior partners meeting in Margin Call, where Zachary Quinto's character has to explain why the firm needs to sell all of a particular asset class: this video One day I will use the line Jeremy Irons uses in this clip. I don't want to spoil it by quoting it.
Oh man, what a fantastic film. It's a been a while since I saw Margin Call, but I still feel like it's one of the films that best captured the 2008 financial crisis. Jeremy Irons' portrayal of a Goldman CEO-like character — I think he's the one who delivers the line you quoted — remains probably the most convincing portrayal of that type of person I can remember. The wonderful board room scene: this video
Yes indeed. Probably the best cinematic take on that is in the movie Margin Call - here's the senior partners meeting: this video Essentially, the dissolution of Glass-Steagall allowed investment banks to create complex financial packages, each one constructed out of dozens if not hundreds of home mortgages. Each individual mortgage was graded but the packages were built out of a mixture of low-grade and high-grade mortgages. Since trading (gambling) with these packages was very lucrative, the investment banks worked with shady mortgage brokers to increase the number of packages by pushing adjustable-rate mortgages on gullible people who probably were not that familiar with compound interest calcululations. These unlikely-to-succeed mortgages were mixed in with the high-qulaity mortages to create a wide variety of highly leveraged financial products, and then bets were placed on the outcomes of trading in these products (derivative markets, synthetic CDO squared nonsense, etc.). Once people realized that many of these mortgages were not going to be paid off, then the avalanche of collapse began. Glass-Steagall, if retained, would have made all of that impossible.
The movie "Margin Call" has an excellent scene where this happends: this video It is clear how it is setup that "to survive we must act now, not in a week, and we must do this expensive sell-off" The whole movie is very well worth watching: [LINK]
Start of the Great Recession. S&P 500 went from 1400 to 800 in six months. I lost 40% of my retirement investment and it was ... distressing to say the least. Movie recommendations: Margin Call this video The Big Short [LINK]