Inside Job is a documentary film written and directed by Charles H. Ferguson. It tries to illustrate through narration and interviews how the global financial crisis of 2008 was the result of deregulation of banking and the resulting unregulated growth of “derivatives” in which bad debts are packaged together and repeatedly resold in what amounts to a massive pyramid scheme, with investment banks hedging their bets by encouraging bad loans, receiving high fees, offloading them on other lenders, and then betting that they will default.
Complicit in this are banking executives, credit rating agencies, politicians (lobbied by the extremely wealthy financial industry), presidential appointees (often former and future banking executives), corporate lawyers, and economists (often likewise drawing large consultant fees from the financial industry), greatly weakened regulatory agencies and regulatory laws, and legions of greedy, risk-prone traders.
The 2008 financial crash in Iceland is presented as a harbinger and microcosm for the phenomenon.
Reminiscent of the film The Corporation, Inside Job’s premise is that enormous incentives together with lack of controls and answerability create an industry that behaves like a sociopath, pursuing its interests relentlessly, at the expense of that vast majority of poor people who end up having paid for it.
The most worrisome conclusion is that even after the evidence of the global financial crash that such unregulated trading has induced, many of the very same people who brought it on are still in power and perpetuating the same system, despite minor cosmetic reforms, because of the undiminished resources and lobbying power of the financial industry.
The sociopathy seems to be scale-invariant: It is present at the level of the banking industry, which is not an individual sentient human being but a virtual entity created by human laws and individual human actions, at the level of individual corporations, likewise not sentient, but also at the level of sentient financial industry executives and the other individuals involved, and they appear to be genuine sociopaths, blinded by their greed and their addiction to the system that allows its uncontrolled indulgence, still perpetuating the same system without the slightest admission of guilt, remorse, or any genuine commitment to reform.