Like some malefactor being grilled by Mike Wallace in his 60 Minutes prime, Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, gets hot under the third-degree light of Charles Ferguson’s questioning in Inside Job. Hubbard, who helped design George W. Bush’s tax cuts on investment gains and stock dividends, finally snaps, “You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot.” But he has already shot himself in the foot. Frederic Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve Board governor and for now an economics professor at Columbia, begins stammering when Ferguson quizzes him about when the Fed first became aware of the danger of subprime loans. “I don’t know the details… I’m not sure exactly… We had a whole group of people looking at this.” “Excuse me,” Ferguson interrupts, “you can’t be serious. If you would have looked, you would have found things.” Ferguson—whose Oscar-nominated No End in Sight analyzed the Bush Administration’s slipshod planning of the Iraq occupation—did look at the Fed, the Wall Street solons and the decisions made by White House administrations over the past 30 years, and he found plenty. Of the docufilms that have addressed the worldwide financial collapse , this cogent, devastating synopsis is the definitive indictment of the titans who swindled America and of their pals in the federal government who enabled them. With a Ph.D. in political science from MIT, Ferguson is no knee-jerk anticapitalist. In the ’90s, he and a partner created a software company and sold it to Microsoft for $133 million. He is at ease talking with his moneyed peers and brings a calm tone to the film . Yet you detect a growing anger as Ferguson digs beneath the rubble, and his fury is infectious. If you’re not enraged by the end of this movie, you haven’t been paying attention. The seeds of the collapse took decades to flower. By 2008, the financial landscape had become so deregulated that homeowners and small investors had few laws to help them. Inflating the banking bubble was a group effort—by billionaire CEOs with their private jets, by agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s that kept giving impeccable ratings to lousy financial products, by a Congress that overturned consumer-protection laws and by Wall Street’s fans in academe, who can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by writing papers favorable to Big Business or sitting on the boards of firms like Goldman Sachs. Who’s Screwing Whom?In the spasm of moral recrimination that followed the collapse, some blamed the bright kids who passed up careers in science or medicine to make millions on Wall Street and charged millions more on their expense accounts for cocaine and prostitutes. After the savings-and-loan scandals of the late-’80s, according to Inside Job, thousands of executives went to jail. This time, with the economy bulking up on the steroids of derivatives and credit-default swaps, the only person who has done any time is Kristin Davis, the madam of a bordello patronized by Wall Streeters. Davis appears in the film, as does disgraced ex–New York governor Eliot Spitzer; both seem almost virtuous when compared with the big-money men. The larger message of both No End in Sight and Inside Job is that American optimism, the engine for the nation’s expansion, can have tragic results. The conquest of Iraq? A slam dunk. Gambling billions on risky mortgages? No worry—the housing market always goes up. Ignoring darker, more prescient scenarios, the geniuses in charge constructed faith-based policies that enriched their pals; they stumbled toward a precipice, and the rest of us fell off. The shell game continues. Inside Job also details how, in Obama’s White House, finance-industry veterans devised a “recovery” that further enriched their cronies without doing much for the average Joe. Want proof? Look at the financial industry’s fat profits of the past year and then at your bank account, your pension plan, your own bottom line. Download TIME’s iPhone, BlackBerry and Android applications.
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