The Big Short based on the book The Big Short – Inside The Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, one of the best films of this century - 10 out of 10

 

The Big Short based on the book The Big Short – Inside The Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, one of the best films of this century

10 out of 10

 

 

The memory of the financial crisis, turned into a Doomsday for the world economy is still haunting many of us, indeed, when I first saw The Big Short, I was not overwhelmed, albeit I have enjoyed it https://notesaboutfilms.blogspot.com/2017/09/note-on-big-short-with-christian-bale.html due to the reluctance to look back at one of the worst periods we have had to pass through, with six dogs, five of a giant breed – borzois

 

From the quintessential The Paradox of Choice http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-paradox-of-choice-by-barry-schartz.html by Barry Schwartz we could extract a lot of wisdom, and one of the most important insights would be that humans are divided into Maximizers and Satisfizers, the former search with fervor for the perfect choice, and hence are always disappointed, while the latter category is the one we want to join, for notwithstanding the fact that they want the best possible option, they are happier

One of the aspects that strike me in The Big Short is that people still act irrationally, and here we see that on the financial, economic front just as for the past seven or eight years we have seen madness in political terms, even if I see the Trump phenomenon indicative of a more general decadence, he is not just an election choice, for me it is a litmus test, if you support him, then you choose a whole set of different ‘values’…

 

Martin Seligman http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/11/flourish-by-martin-seligman-i-ii.html is the co-founder of Positive Psychology, author of important books like Authentic Happiness, and the one that has identified a list of Character Strengths, among them, under wisdom, you have love of learning, curiosity (not for gossip and innuendo, we could envisage) creativity, perspective, open-mindedness, and if one is embracing Putin, Trump, MBS, Erdogan, the fellow from South Africa, who is now with Putin, and all the others that stand with this and other despots, Modi too, then we do not share the same ethics

Another luminary of our times is Yuval Harari http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/homo-deus-brief-history-of-tomorrow-by.html who argues in his extremely influential books, Homo Deus, Sapiens, Twenty One Lessons, that we have reached a golden age, where we live so much longer, have access to technology that has improved lives so much, in A Brief History of Tomorrow he even suggests that we will become the Gods from the title, living ever longer, progress in medicine taking life expectancy to new limits.

 

The same thinker though has written some days ago an article in The Economist, and has lectures on the subject, one of them available on YouTube, about Artificial Intelligence and the danger it presents, how it has become so skillful at making up stories, which are essential in religion, propaganda, and how this could eventually lead to the creation of new faiths, and just like Qannon pushes absurd theories, yet embraced by tens of millions (mostly, if not all trumpers, MAGA ‘deplorables’, to quote Hilary Clinton, who was on the spot with the use of the term, if it was not clever to use it in the campaign…wait a second, if she did not use that, fans of the monster would have chosen her over their idiotic idol, no, no way, so she was right on all fronts) AI could push terrible ideas online…

 

The Big Short demonstrates that the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ has limitations, the main characters of the story had tried to alert investors and the world, telling them that a crash is coming, there is fraud and the fact that financial institutions, banks, investment banks and real estate outfits pressed for bigger risks will eventually bring the whole structure down, as presented by Jared Vennett of Deutche Bank aka Ryan Gosling in the film with his towers that had triple A assets at the top and B properties at the bottom

When a distance has been in place between 2008 and the time of seeing the movie (again) one can laugh, for this is both tragic and hilarious…take the trip that the Mark Baum aka Steve Carrell takes to Florida, to assess the situation that they had been warned about, and the visit to the…stripers club, where Baum is interested in the credit worthiness, the perspective of the property bought by the woman, not the show, and he asks her to move less, for he will still pay, only he cannot follow the answers.

 

The stripper has invested in…five houses and a condominium, because the packing of subprime mortgages has reached such an insane level that realtors would sell to anyone, without caring if they will be able to pay, furthermore, they will convince clients that had no means that they can do it, they have property and it can be theirs, pushing gullible, insolvent individuals into bankruptcy, eventually sending them to live on the streets, when the financial crisis would hit, millions of jobs will be lost, the world economy would tumble, debt will be accumulated…we still have debts to pay from that time

I remember how crazy it was, after a period of indulgence - “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness…Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery” as Charles dickens has said, we had had years of Wine and Roses http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/08/days-of-wine-and-roses-written-by-jp.html

 

Now for a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html