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I'd love this scene from Margin Call. I'm not familiar with each of these economic crashes that are mentioned, and I'm curious about the percentages never changing....seems to be very true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtFyP0qy9XU

It's a great scene and line that's always stayed with me.

"It's certainly no different today than it's ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, 1837,1857, 1884, 1901, 1907, 1929, 1937, 1974, 1987, Jesus didn't that fuck me up good, 1992, 1997, 2000, and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over, and over again. *We can't help ourselves*. And you and I can't control or stop it, or even slow it. We just react. We make a lot of money if we get it right, and we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. There have always been, and they always will be *the same percentage of winners and losers*. Happy fucks and sad sacks, fat cats and starving dogs in this world. There may be more of us today than has ever been, but *the percentages they stay exactly the same.*"

Have you seen the movie Margin Call?

There’s a great scene where the CEO of a Goldman-style bank is recapping the last 100+ years of global financial collapses and he mentions, “we just can’t help ourselves.”

https://youtu.be/LtFyP0qy9XU

One of the best banking movies I’ve ever seen. Jeremy Irons absolutely nails his role.

⬐ jstx1

I kind of enjoyed watching it and at the same time I don't think it's a good movie. It's so overly dramatic, the conflict between the characters is super vague, and the most annoying thing is the language they use - a lot of the time the characters talk to each other with metaphors and generic cliches to the point where they aren't saying anything. But the thing is that everyone in the room works in finance, they have no reason to be super generic and non-technical (apart from making the movie more accessible).

I imagine that people who work in finance would like it even less than I did.

⬐ vishnugupta

It’s a terrific movie that perfectly complements The Big Short.

⬐ headmelted

Big Short was a movie that other people loved but I just didn’t really like all that much. I don’t even know why. I think maybe the cameo scenes made it feel a little dumbed down?

I’d also watched Inside Job not long prior and really enjoyed it, but others found it too dry. Different strokes I guess.

⬐ WA

Isn’t that the movie in which every dialog is basically "but look at the numbers" without ever going into any kind of detail? I didn’t like it.

⬐ jasonladuke0311

They did go into detail about the risk and potential losses in the meeting scene.

⬐ DoughnutHole

Well it's not really about the numbers - the details of the collapse don't really matter. In the context of the last crash we know the global economy is brought down by financialised insanity and fraud. It's a morality play showing what's happening inside the first firm to realise the house of cards is about to collapse, and who are about to bring it down themselves by being the first out the door. The details aren't really the point.

⬐ na85

I just watched that a few weeks ago. Great movie, but to be honest I thought Jeremy Irons was unconvincing and played the role poorly/was poorly cast.

⬐ michannne

Felt the opposite, he really exuded that cold-and-carefree-but-wise archetype I'd expect from a mid-2000s cocky hedge fund manager who got themselves into that position in the first place.

⬐ headmelted

The character was based on Dick Fuld, which if you look at any interviews with him from that time you can kind of see where the inspiration came from.

⬐ sharkweek

The scene in the boardroom where the analyst says, “well, that’s where it becomes more of a projection” then looks sheepishly over at the two VPs.

I love the way Irons’ character catches the glance and says, “you’re speaking to me Mr. Sullivan.”

⬐ mwattsun

I watched on your recommendation and it's a damn fine movie. Thanks.

⬐ throwaway_1928

Will Emerson: 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 f-in' 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 f-in' fair really f-in' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don't. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I'm willing to swallow, so f em. F normal people. You know, the funny thing is, tomorrow if all of this goes t-s up they're gonna crucify us for being too reckless but if we're wrong, and everything gets back on track? Well then, the same people are gonna laugh till they p-ss their pants cause we're gonna all look like the biggest p-ssies God ever let through the door.

Seth Bregman: Do you think we're gonna be wrong?

Will Emerson: [long pause] No, they're all f-d.

(edited for language)

⬐ iplist

Welcome to this shiny new thing, called the internet, where you're allowed to say fuck!

⬐ candiodari

Which illustrates the real point: "what we have to give them" is debt. Can we grow debt from this point forward?

In the short term: I don't see what the problem is with growing debt at this point.

Oh and, btw, the FED will never repay its balance sheet. It's just not going to happen, ever, under any circumstances.

Which gets me to my, seemingly rather unique, position: this is not a financial crisis (at least not yet). There's problems yes, but there's also a lot of money to solve them. Which means they will get solved, quickly. And just because we're recovering from the mother of all supply crunches and the numbers are going down to readjust, we see a lot of models crying "recession". There is no real recession. There's a recession in money paid for things. There's no recession in physical goods being distributed, quite the opposite. People aren't suddenly vastly more indebted (like in 2008) than they can be.

There was such a big problem with supply and demand that when we all collectively decided to take away to artificial roadblocks, which turned out to be the point some idiot Russian decides to use to ... and supply and demand had such a big and such a wide ranging adjustment to make that it took the the law of supply and demand ~12-18 months to adjust prices, of which some 6-8 months are still in the future. Now supplier prices are adjusting down, not for housing, not for finance, but for everything else, and everybody cries recession. Wrong. Supply just shot through the roof and demand is actually rising. The same refrain is seen everywhere. Prices for X ROCKETED up, and are coming back down rather quickly. Take your pick cars, flights, food, chips, ... There are confusing factors, such as with housing: people have been using SUBSIDISED money for housing and this is being wound down, people are getting kicked out of the housing they're in. So ... lots of complaints. But this is actually an indication, of course, of too much demand, not too little. Too much demand, too much people yelling here's money, now give me ... This shouldn't lead to a recession!

Of course my problem is ... I'm "fighting the FED". The FED disagrees with me. Of course. I'm fighting JUST the Fed at this point. I'm still on the side of the ECB, BOJ and PBOC ...

Supermoney by George Goodman - he wrote under the pseudonym "Adam Smith".

p.s. You might enjoy watching "Margin Call", if you haven't seen it before. This clip is particularly relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtFyP0qy9XU

This is probably traceable to the amorphous nature of modern work. In the past, working all day meant you had a physical result, whether that’s a clean garden or a pile of widgets to sell. These days in the information economy, working all day mostly just gets you more words on a screen. Humans are physical creatures but our contemporary work style treats them as pure spirit.

Reminds me of this scene in Margin Call, about the 2009 financial crash:

"You're one of the luckiest guys in the world, Sam. You could have been digging ditches all these years."

"That's true, and if I had, at least there'd be some holes in the ground to show for it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtFyP0qy9XU

⬐ renewiltord

This is another traditional view but I find it hard to believe the truth of it because of the strong bias (and personal experience): happy people do not generally know they are happy, unhappy people think that doing a different thing is sufficient for happiness.

Personally, I have found fulfillment from menial labour only when I have found no fulfillment from knowledge work. Achievement at the latter beats out the former by a large multiple, and doing the former when I have access to the latter feels me leaving like I've wasted time.