trims
Since: Aug, 2012
Mar 16th 2021 at 12:47:59 AM
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As such, this page needs a MAJOR overhaul. It's injecting a whole lot of personal opinion about stuff that isn't actually in the movie.
To be clear here, it's fine to label Tuld as a villian because he made money selling MBS to people. It's NOT fine to somehow now label him a villian because of the firesale in the film.
So much of this page simply gets the movie completely wrong: there's enormous amounts of accusations that the characters are somehow evil, wrong, unethical, or otherwise bad because of what they're doing in the film.
This is simply incorrect, and confuses what is going on in the movie with what the Mortgage-Backed Securities market as a whole was.
There's a large amount of evidence that demonstrates the events PRIOR to the film are certainly that - the creation and selling of MBS "products" itself was horridly unethical and absolutely should have been illegal.
But that's not what's happening in this movie. This movie is essentially showing a "behind the scenes" view of what happens when a Bubble breaks. It used the 2008 MBS crisis as its format, but it could easily have been set in 2001 when the Internet Bubble broke. Or any other time right before a major market "correction".
People can say the characters were unethical (and yes, that INCLUDE Spacey's character, for sure) to sell the MBS in the first place.
But what goes on in the movie itself is perfectly ethical, as it how they do the firesale. They're selling a product that people know what it is (or at least, what they're doing selling it today is no different than any other day), and to people who know what they're doing. Note this is NOT a "retail" securities company - despite the off-the-cuff quote, the firm sells just to other trading firms. NOT grandmas and ordinary investors. These are Wall Street sharks selling to other Wall Street sharks. And if you're playing in this circle, you're EXPECTED to know what you're doing.
As such, they've discovered something about the item the entire market hasn't yet. They didn't discover this unethically. They thus realize that what they're selling isn't worth what everyone else thinks it is. So they sell what they have before everyone else discovers this insight.
That's how markets work. People make money on differences in perception of value.
Substitute "tulips" for "MBS", and move this movie back to the 1600s, and you'll see that the people in the movie aren't somehow unethical monsters for dumping tulips right before everyone else figures out they're really not worth their price.
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