Short on Truth

Rating: 3/10 (16 February 2016)

I found it ironic that a movie that preached about the truth went out of its way to lie. It's as if the screenwriters started by listing every politically correct message (including blaming the evil 1% - of which Pitt, Carell, Bale, and Gosling are a part) and wrote the story around it. Lies of the movie, the true facts, and where to find them:
1. Mortgage funds were greatly profitable for the banks by filling them with riskier mortgages (sub-prime). Banks that did not engage in taking on shorts broke even between the profit from the bonds and losses of sub-primes. HISTORY: 1977: Carter passes the Community Reinvestment Act which still called for sound banking practices. So Carter started this but was not the true architect. 1995: Clinton amends the Community Reinvestment Act to abandon sound banking practices and impose heavy fines to banks if they turn away sub-primes for minorities. These loans were then vetted and backed by Fannie and Freddie. 1999: Clinton repeals the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 allowing banks to invest in the stock market. 2002: Dems saw fit to exclude mortgages from SOX regulations as no sub-prime mortgages would pass muster, which would effectively end the Community Reinvestment Act. It also gave Fannie and Freddie a license to steal. IN A NUTSHELL: The banks were forced to accept bad mortgages (sub-prime) by the gov't and were losing money. After Glass-Stegall was repealed, the banks put the bad mortgages in bonds to trade them for profit. The people buying and trading the bonds, not the banks, were making a killing (among those people BTW, were the Clintons). 1999 – 2007: Fannie and Freddie cook their books allowing the problem to balloon into a huge bubble and crash the world economy. An astute federal regulator caught this and hearings pursued. The Dems blocked the hearings and ran interference for Freddie and Fanny to continue to cook the books so no-one would be aware of the coming crash. 2007: Wanting an October surprise, Chuck Schumer's office leaks the true housing numbers to the media. The next day it is reported and public and the economy crashes. The Dems (counting on the ignorance of the public who don't bother to educate themselves) blame the Republicans and get their October surprise. Obama's poll numbers (which were failing since the Republic Convention) go through the roof and he becomes the next President of the US.
2. The movies says nobody knew about the upcoming mortgage/banking crisis and no one is paying attention, because the banks are making money hand over fist. This just isn't true. There were warnings about this as early as 7-years before it happened. As I stated before, the gov't knew about this and the Dems kept blocking it from being investigated, resolved, or leaked to the public. This is where the Republicans are also to blame and they also did not 'leak' this info to the public back when the damage could have been managed. This was at the bequest of the Dems to be bi-partisan. Just Google Fannie-Freddie hearings of 2004 to see for yourself. Additionally, Paul Kasriel of Northern Trust on July 30, 2004 (before the geniuses portrayed in the movie every saw this) warned that 60% of banks earnings assets were mortgage related twice as much as in 1986 and if the housing market would go bust, then it would devastate the banking industry and the economy (Forbes).
3. The movie first says Greenspan was clueless, then the movie said he was the architect. First, how can Greenspan be clueless if he was also the architect? Second, I've shown above, that Clinton was the true architect of this debacle. Greenspan warned about this in his annual reports but shrugged it off because he miscalculated that the housing market consisted of multiple bubbles so if one failed the others would not be affected.
4. The movie shows sub-primes as having been taken by typical white people, knowing full well that the Community Reinvestment Act only applied to minorities. The end of the movie even goes so far as to have Steve Carell monologue about how this will be blamed on minorities and poor people as it always has been in the past. I don't remember a bad economy ever being blamed on poor people. Second, it was the minorities that caused this by taking loans that they couldn't afford because the gov't told them they had it coming to them. The makers of this movie are so afraid that people like me would expose their lies that they take the time to stereotype us by saying we just want to blame minorities as white people always want to do.
5. The big banks were wrong for creating the shorting market because they thought it would be easy money. These are the only banks that needed help after the crash. The small and medium sized banks were fine, because they didn't get greedy. The fact that Bush and Obama gave bail-outs to save the big banks is the real crime. Who should have gone to jail: Franklin Raines of Fanny Mae (a gov't appointee who cooked the books and made millions).Instead, Obama rewarded Raines by appointing him as an economic adviser.
If I learned one thing from this movie, or more accurately the reviews of this movie: "Why We Should Hate Corporate America," "A Story that Must Be Told;" it's that even with the Internet providing a wealth of information at the touch of a button, the majority of US citizens are woefully ignorant and deserve to be treated like idiots by Hollywood and their government.