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Job” offers a sweeping synthesis, going as far back as the Reagan administration and as far afield as
Iceland in its anatomy of the financial crisis.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the highest-profile players declined to be interviewed. Mr. Summers
appears only in news footage, and none of his predecessors or successors as Treasury secretary – not
Robert E. Rubin or Henry M. Paulson Jr. or Timothy F. Geithner – submit to Mr. Ferguson’s questions. Nor
do any of the top executives at Goldman Sachs or the other big banks. Most of the interviewees are, at
least from the perspective of the filmmaker, friendly witnesses, adding fuel to the director’s
comprehensive critique of the way business has been done in the United States and the other advanced
capitalist countries for the past two decades.
Both American political parties are indicted; “Inside Job” is not simply another belated settling of
accounts with Mr. Bush and his advisers, though they are hardly ignored. The scaling back of government
oversight and the weakening of checks on speculative activity by banks began under Reagan and continued
during the Clinton administration. And with each administration the market in derivatives expanded, and
alarms about the dangers of this type of investment were ignored. Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the
International Monetary Fund, presented a paper in 2005 warning of a “catastrophic meltdown” and was
mocked as a “Luddite” by Mr. Summers.
Meanwhile, some investment bankers – at Goldman Sachs in particular – were betting against the positions
they were pushing on their customers. An elaborate house of cards had been constructed in which bad
consumer loans were bundled into securities, which, were certified as sound by rating agencies paid by
the banks and then insured via credit-default swaps. One risky bet was stacked on top of another, and in
retrospect the collapse of the whole edifice, along with the loss of jobs, homes, pensions and political
confidence, seems inevitable.
How did this happen? Mr. Ferguson is no conspiracy theorist; nor is he inclined toward structural or
systemic explanations. Markets are not like tectonic plates, shifting on their own. Visible hands write
laws and make deals, and in this case a combination of warped values and groupthink seems to have driven
very intelligent men (and they were mostly men) toward folly. In addition to business and government, Mr.
Ferguson aims his critique at academia, suggesting that the discipline of economics and more than a few
prominent economists were corrupted by consulting fees, seats on boards of directors and membership in
the masters of the universe club.
When he challenges some of these professors, in particular those who held positions of responsibility in
the White House or in the Federal Reserve, they are reduced to stammering obfuscation – Markets are
complicated! Who could have predicted? I don’t see any conflict of interest – and occasionally provoked
to testiness. Mr. Ferguson, for his part, cannot always contain his incredulity or rein in his sarcasm.
Occasionally his voice pipes up from off camera, saying things like, “You can’t be serious!”
But it is hard to imagine a movie more serious, and more urgent, than “Inside Job.” There are a few
avenues that might have been explored more thoroughly, in particular the effects of the crisis on
ordinary, non-Wall-Street-connected workers and homeowners. The end of the film raises a disturbing
question, as Mr. Damon exhorts viewers to demand changes in the status quo so that the trends associated
with unchecked speculation of the kind that caused the last crisis – rising inequality, neglect of
productive capacity, endless cycles of boom and bust – might be reversed.
This call to arms makes you wonder why anger of the kind so eloquently expressed in “Inside Job” has been
so inchoate. And through no fault of its own, the film may leave you dispirited as well as enraged. Its
fate is likely to be that of other documentaries: praised in some quarters, nitpicked in others and
shrugged off by those who need its message most. which is a shame.
“Inside Job” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some drug and sex references and pervasive
obscenity, though not the verbal kind.

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