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Canberra Today 12°/15° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘The Big Short’ (M) 130 mins *** and a half

THE average punter probably knows more about outer space than the byzantine complexities of high finance, which may be one reason for the opprobrium that the average punter feels toward banks and bankers.

Film-maker Adam McKay has taken the events that did so much to gestate the Global Financial Crisis as the material for this difficult-to-read but very entertaining account telling how greed brought calamity to more than eight million American homeowners when banks foreclosed on mortgages that prudent lending rules would never have permitted.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, an eccentric former medico now managing a hedge fund, whose analysis leads him to conclude the housing market is a bubble that will burst ere long and who therefore bets his clients’ investment against the banks who consider him a crackpot certain to lose the bet because it’s never happened before.

Steve Carell plays Michael Baum, an idealist fed up with corruption in the finance industry, who with his associates works at arms length under merchant banker Morgan Stanley. Baum joins forces with Deutschbank’s Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) who believes he can cash in on Burry’s model. Hustlers Gellett and Shipley get hold of Vennett’s prospectus but, too small to get into the game, ask retired banker Ben Rickett (Brad Pitt) to help them.

So here are three groups convinced that the banks are stupid, ignorant of what’s really going on. Here’s an attack building against the general US economy, to the detriment of a public that trusts the banks. McKay’s film takes no prisoners in uncovering the inner workings of an industry that holds all the cards in a game that customers can’t win.

At Palace Electric, Capitol 6, Dendy, Hoyts

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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