History Film / TheBigShort

-->'''Mark Baum''': I want to short every piece of paper he's touched.

* PragmaticVillainy: The biggest difference between Vennett and the banks he works for is that he recognises how short-sighted and self-destructive is the level of fraud being done in Wall Street when being honest could earn them more sustainable profits.

** Mark Burry is introduced sitting in his office, waving drumsticks around and giving a lengthy InfoDump about mortgage defaults during TheGreatDepression. We then find out he's actually conducting a job interview with a ''very'' bewildered analyst, to whom he gives the job, demands a list of thousands of mortgages, and then starts rocking out in front of his spreadsheets.

-->'''Baum''': Banks have given us 25% of interest rate on credit cards, they have saddled us with student debt that we will never get out from under; then this guy comes in and tells me those same banks got greedy, they lost track of the market and I can profit of their stupidity? ''Fuck yeah!'' I want him to be right.

** Later on, Shipler and Geller have another one when New Century bank files for bankruptcy as they realise that the collapse has finally begun and the banks are selling the failing [=CDO=]s without disclosing their real value until their sale is complete, essentially passing the bomb they have created to other people so it can blow up on them, the two decide to try to warn the media about what is happening - which isn't interested.

** There are a series of celebrity cameos that directly address the audience in a series of self-contained cutaway scenes to help explain some of the complicated financial concepts shown in the film. See InfoDump.

* InsufferableGenius: When the market doesn't collapse and even goes up, Burry and his sole remaining employee at Scion have a discussion about the possibility of Burry simply being wrong about his financial predictions. He humbly admits that there indeed might be such possibility, and invokes this very trope for himself as a reason why he can't accept the fact he might have been mistaken. In the end, however, he gets validated, and the market crashes harder than even he expected. Plus, there is of course, this exchange earlier on:

** Vennett gives Baum one last heads-up about Benny Kleeger, (a stand-in for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howie_Hubler Howie Hubler]]) who trades in bond at Morgan Stanley, taking heavy losses and suggests him to sell his shorts now before Morgan goes under and he has nothing left to short.

--->[''Mark is on the phone to Vinnie, while the guys from Morgan Stanley's risk assessment team are in the adjoining office to Vinnie's.'']\\

[''He hangs up and goes into the other office. The risk assessment guys look up at him.'']\\

* DoesNotLikeShoes: Michael Burry is seen plenty of times walking around the Scion office barefoot. His doubters use this to mock him, among his other weird traits. "So Mike Burry, who gets his hair cut at Supercuts, and doesn’t wear shoes, knows more than Alan Greenspan." Well, go figure, he sort of did...

* BigBrotherIsWatching: According to Ben Rickert. Shipley and Geller have to use 14 different phone numbers to call him.

** The scene is set a few years before Snowden would expose said monitoring program to the public, making Ben ProperlyParanoid.

--> '''Mark Baum:''' And what bothers me isn’t that fraud is “not nice,” or that fraud is “mean.” It’s that for fifteen thousand years, fraud and short-sighted thinking has never, ever worked. Not once. How the hell did we all forget that?

* OnlyTheLeadsGetAHappyEnding: And the leads fully realize this, creating the film's DownerEnding.

* CheatersNeverProsper: Explicitly stated by Baum at one point.

:: Sadly, this trope gets subverted late in the movie as Baum realises that the banks were counting on a bailout from the government in case something like this happened, essentially being able to get away from the collapse with a slap on the wrist by virtue of being too big to fail.

-->'''Executive:''' So Mike Burry, a guy who gets his hair cut at Supercuts and doesn't wear shoes, knows more than Alan Greenspan and Mike Paulsen.\\

* GoneHorriblyRight: A play of this trope. Everyone in the end gets away with big paydays on their bet against the financial system, they also get a front seat of the consequences from accurately betting that the system would fail.

* NeverMyFault:
** Georgia, an executive at Standard and Poors, excuses the fact that the rating agencies are basically selling out their assesments instead of properly rating the bonds first by saying that if they don't their competitors will simply give the banks what they want and run them out business. When Baum calls her out on this, she then deflects her own hand in the fraud by saying she's under her boss orders to do so.

** Sadly, this trope gets averted late in the movie as Baum realises that the banks were counting on a bailout from the government in case something like this happened, essentially being able to get away from the collapse with a slap on the wrist by virtue of being too big to fail.

** None of the on-screen people we see contributing to the crisis seem to fully realise what they're doing; yes, they know they are variously ripping-off ordinary people, passing their own gambling risk off to other businesses and using dishonest ratings to make it all work, but they all seem to think they're engaging in harmless book-cooking rather than catastrophically undermining the global economy. Baum works on this assumption throughout (and his TheReasonYouSuckSpeech below [[HanlonsRazor assumes stupidity rather than malice]]), but he broken-heartedly revises his opinion after the bailout.

* SpiritualSuccessor: Essentially, it's a {{Docudrama}} version of ''Film/TheOtherGuys'', which was made by the same director. Alternatively, it's an AdaptationExpansion of that film's CreativeClosingCredits.

* UnconventionalLearningExperience: Due to the way the film was made, it ends up being not only a story about the titular big shorts but also a near documentary of each financial instrument that lead to the collapse of 2008, as well as the circumstances that allowed it to happen.

* HoistByTheirOwnPetard: When Burry approaches Goldman Sachs (and then a few other banks) to create for him a new investment tool - credit swaps that pay off in case of failure of [=CDO=]s - they eagerly go along with it, thinking he's some sort of lunatic that they can easily fleece. After all, there is no way the mortgage and real estate market will collapse. By doing so, every single bank Burry made a deal with ends up not only going down with the financial meltdown, but on top of that, they ''also'' have to pay him for his swaps, netting his fund almost 2.7 ''billion''. And that's just Burry, since others of course also used the tools he created. The very bankers Burry made the deal with ended up without jobs by the end of it, completely puzzled by what even happened.

* HumorDissonance: Plenty of times, many of the people who are being reckless and/or fraudulent in the industry do so as if scamming people off their money to make a buck is party time.