History Film / TooBigToFail

* ZillionDollarBill: John Mack refuses to consider merging Morgan Stanley with JP Morgan, because other investors, including Mitsubishi, are considering deals with him. In RealLife, Mitsubishi agreed to bail out Morgan Stanley; ordinarily the money would have been wire-transferred, but banks were closed on Columbus Day and Morgan Stanley was literally hours away from collapse, so Mitsubishi sent a courier with a physical check for '''$9,000,000,000.00''' (that's "billion" with a "b"). According to Sorkin's book, the Morgan Stanley executive who accepted the check nearly had a nervous breakdown (despite being fully briefed in advance on what he was receiving), and had to walk ''very'' carefully into the firm's Wall Street offices to deposit the check in the firm's secure vault.

** When Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner urge John Mack to consider merging Morgan Stanley with JP Morgan, Mack responds that the immediate consequence of such a merger would be the layoff of somewhere between 20,000 and 45,000 Morgan Stanley employees. When Bernanke suggests that such a sacrifice might have to be paid to preserve the system as a whole, Mack hangs up on them.

--->''They almost bring down the U.S. economy as we know it, but we can't put any hooks on the $125 billion we're loaning them because... '''they might not take it?'''''

* GunboatDiplomacy: One of Paulson's early solutions is to ask Congress for temporary funding to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, reasoning that just having that authority will calm the markets without him actually having to use it: "''They need to think I've got a bazooka in my pocket.''"
** A few weeks later, in Beijing, a Chinese official points out to Paulson that Fannie and Freddie's stocks are still in freefall, and suggests that ''"carrying that bazooka around has not helped matters."''

** Lampshaded in the film's final lines: even as Bernanke and Paulson breathe a sigh of relief that TARP has passed, they admit to each other that they can do little except hope that the banks use the money the way the government wants them to. Paulson says, ''"of course they will"'' with a brittle smile; [[BlatantLies he's lying and he and everyone else in the room knows it.]]

* JerkassHasAPoint: For all the blame the banks got for pushing subprime mortgages, the fault of the customers who overextended themselves financially can't be ignored. Dick Fuld's statement below may be [[JustForPun dickish]] but correct.

** The Big 5 bank [=CEOs=] and the French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde lay into Paulson for forcing Lehman to declare bankruptcy. The bank heads are livid because a British regulator didn't unfreeze Lehman's assets, preventing their clients from selling off whatever Lehman stock they had. They blame Paulson for not handling this detail with the British before he made Lehman file. Lagarde rips him for allowing Lehman to fail in the first place, as many European institutions had invested in it. They are blaming the wrong person, as it was actually Lehman's job to negotiate these details of their own bankruptcy proceeding. Lagarde doesn't realize that multiple attempts were made to save Lehman, and they all failed due to [[JustForPun Dick Fuld's dickishness]] or their sheer financial weakness.

** Dick Fuld gripes about how bankers and Wall Street are always AcceptableTargets, but the real blame should lie with the ''"nimrod"'' homeowners who eagerly accepted credit to buy houses (and other things) they knew they couldn't afford;

* AmericanDream: Jim Wilkinson explains to Michelle Davis that the current crisis came on after so many people ''"reach[ed] for the American Dream"'' (i.e. owning a house), believing that access to flimsy credit was the same thing as being able to afford these houses.

* AppealToForce: Paulson says that if the Big 5 banks don't help Lehman by buying its toxic assets, "we will remember".

* {{Greed}}: The root cause of the financial crisis, in at least three major ways explained by Paulson and his deputies to Michele Davis, who is supposed to explain this all to the press in a way they can understand:

* SpiritualSuccessor:
** To the Lionsgate film ''Film/MarginCall'', which was a fictionalized version of what Lehman did, before the events of this movie began.
** It also has a Spiritual Precursor (prequel) in the movie ''Film/TheBigShort'', which was about an investor who anticipated this crisis in 2005 and made a killing off of it.

*** In RealLife (according to an interview published in ''Literature/GameChange''), Jim Wilkinson (a lifelong Republican) was so aggravated by [=McCain=]'s antics, and his lack of preparedness during his limited participation in the TARP negotiations, that he wrote the Senator's campaign, asking for his contribution back, ''and'' cast his vote for Obama.

* AdaptationalVillainy: Dick Fuld is easily the least sympathetic character in the story, and the viewer might conclude that he preferred to let Lehman Brothers collapse rather than cede his control of it, or else that he was happy to let it fall as long as he could secure his own golden parachute. However, the book emphasizes that Fuld worked for Lehman for over forty years, and earnestly wanted to save a company he truly loved; it was just his misfortune that his decisions were disastrously ill-informed.