Why 'Margin Call' remains Wall Street's favorite movie
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By the second or third time watching it, I realized how much of the boardroom scene is kabuki theater. The CEO makes people get up and say their parts not necessarily to learn new information, but to milk the moment and bring everyone through a thought process. I think he knew what he wanted to do before he walked through the door. But he needed everyone else to understand the problem and believe in the drastic solution.
I tried googling it but I get some movie theater in San Francisco and a Wikipedia page describing it as a Japanese theatre with dancing and elaborate costumes and flair. I've not seen it used in an expression before.
E.g. Someone might say that politicians arguing energetically about gun violence are playing it up for their constituents and don’t actually care about the issue. It’s all a performance, neither side actually cares if anything is accomplished. It’s a show for their constituents.
I’m not sure it’s the most apt phrase for the scene but it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie.
* Unfair blanket layoff precluding a senior person from alerting anyone * One of the senior execs being made the scapegoat, framed by her evident accomplice in the scheming * Engineers who become quants * Locking people up in a room to make sure they do not spill the beans to anyone
I think Margin Call deserves to be on the same rung of the ladder as LA Confidential - a timeless classic, and some of the cast as well!
Also: it’s a highly quoted movie on YouTube where copyright has not been strictly enforced.
Every part of it is a specific area of the business: the lay offs, the move forward after them, the analyst crunching the data, the gathering after his discovery, the communication, the meetings and the decision making.
All of it from the perspective of a financial institution, knowing what we know: I wonder what would have happened if that movie happened 15 years before the crash and the public perception of the content (probably dismissed as “too Hollywood”).
The Big Short - Banking, investor, hedgefund perspective
Too Big to Fail - Government perspective
Most of my friends dont like any of the these. Even those who somehow got through them liked Big Short most.
For me Big Short is the last on that list. Margin Call being first by a long short and then Too Big to Fail.
And make no mistake Wall Street gambles full well knowing that the government will save them - Steve Bannon was right on the spot about that.
The notion of people working for their selfish interests in a way that fosters cooperation and improvement on a larger scale gets treated to caricature interpretation often, but under that, there is a lot of evidence for it. Go ahead and describe a contrary viewpoint.
The inability of free market capitalism to regulate its own externalities doesn’t really plead in its favour either but I can’t say other systems have fared better there.
Anyway, I would hazard that most people in the world don’t work strictly for their selfish interests anyway but rather for a mix of their family, community while trying to apply their own moral to the best of their ability to foster a better world. Therefore reducing free market economies to selfishness on an individual level seems misguided.
While somehow trendy amongst part of the American population nowadays, the Randian idea of selfishness being for the best is not actually supported by much.
Seriously, what are you talking about?
To get back to my original point, I think modern China is actually pretty far from 'greed is good'.
It's an autocratic country where the central party has a tight leash on the economy and which doesn't hesitate to make CEOs disappear when they get too rich and powerful. Population movement is strictly controlled and central planning is very much alive and kicking in the more rural part of the country.
Even the housing market bubble was propped by state owned companies with state owned banks money which is why it's not exploding spectacularly.
Viewing China has a free market economy is a mistake. It's a mixed socialist market economy and under Xi that means a lot of socialism with a dash of free market.
That said gov’t can throw billionaires under the bus and use elements of the state to prop the system up may look nicer - but the average person still ends up losing/paying. We’ll see in a decade what that really looks like eh?
However, the outcome doesn't have to be that everybody gets rich.
Speculation and gambling is greed and not useful sort. Building new factory because you think you can make money is much better sort of greed.