The Big Short: The Global Financial Crisis

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Something that has marked the United States as a capitalist country, are the multiple financial crises we’ve been had on our history. Most of these crises had occurred as a result of the bad management of the capital, but also for the corruption in our financial institutions and the almost null regulation for part of the government to control these institutions. The 2015 film The Big Short, exposes the most recent major financial crisis in this country: the 2007 financial crisis, caused by the housing market crash, that triggered the 2008 Recession. As a result, millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs, and this generated in consequence, billions of dollars in lost for the country’s economy. The film explains in detail what were the factors that originated the crisis, and shows how a bunch of smart and opportunistic people saw this coming and made a profit of it, by betting against the housing market stability, something that seemed completely irrational and foolish. It explains in an understandable way the complicated mechanisms …show more content…

It goes showing throughout the film how they were able to predict this event based on the facts from past crises, like the Wall Street collapse in 1929, leading to the so called Great Depression, “in which thousands of Americans lost their jobs and houses, and the trust in the financial institution were severely compromised, mostly due to the fact that the banks used depositors’ money to buy stocks without their approval.” (Amadeo, Kimberly) This offers some context to the movie, and also connects the 2007 financial crisis with another similar event, making a bond that shows how this is not something new and unexpected, but on the contrary, it is something that already happened and it was caused by the same circumstances, the tolerance in the use of fraudulent and corrupted schemes by the financial institutions and the lack of regulation by the