American Casino

J

jwlam_IHB

New member
Anyone watch this movie yet?



<a href="http://www.americancasinothemovie.com/">American Casino</a>



<strong>SYNOPSIS</strong>



We All Lost



?I don?t think most people really understood that they were in a casino? says award-winning financial reporter Mark Pittman. ?When you?re in the Street?s casino, you?ve got to play by their rules.? This film finally explains how and why over $12 trillion of our money vanished into the American Casino.



For chips, the casino used real people, like the ones we meet in Baltimore. These are not the heedless spendthrifts of Wall Street legend, but a high school teacher, a therapist, a minister of the church. They were sold on the American Dream as a safe investment. Too late, they discovered the truth. Cruelly, as African ? Americans, they and other minorities were the prime targets for the subprime loans that powered the casino. According to the Federal Reserve, African-Americans were four times more likely than whites to be sold subprime loans.



We meet the players. A banker explains that the complex securities he designed were ?fourth dimensional? and sold to ?idiots.? A senior Wall Street ratings agency executive describes being ordered to ?guess? the worth of billion dollar securities. A mortgage loan salesman explains how borrowers? incomes were inflated to justify a loan. A billionaire describes how he made a massive bet that people would lose their homes and has won $500 million, so far.



Finally, as the global financial system crumbles and outraged but impotent lawmakers fume at Wall Street titans, we see the casino?s endgame: Riverside, California a foreclosure wasteland given over to colonies of rats and methamphetamine labs, where disease-bearing mosquitoes breed in their millions on the stagnant swimming pools of yesterday?s dreams.



Filmed over twelve months in 2008, American Casino takes you inside a game that our grandchildren never wanted to play.
 
The last day it's playing in the area is up in LA on Thursday. Graph and I are talking about going up that night. We'll see.
 
Cayci and I did end up making it up to LA to see this movie. I thought it was pretty good. I do have my criticisms of it, and I will give a full review of it tomorrow, er later today. I didn't feel sorry for the borrowers they profiled, and that is one of my main criticisms. However, one thing that made both Cayci and I LOL...



Former Bear Stearns CDO trader on CDOs squared that went something like this:



FBS dude: "With CDOs squared you would take the B rated tranches of the pools and chop them up and get a AAA rating. Then you would leverage it 100 times... even a 1000 times. Making it even more worthless than it already was."



Interviewer: "So... who would buy these CDOs squared?"



FBS dude: "Hahahaha IDIOTS! Hahahaha!"



I think Cayci and I were the only ones who LOL'd in the whole theater while everyone else was in complete shock.
 
[quote author="graphrix" date=1253893836]

FBS dude: "Hahahaha IDIOTS! Hahahaha!"



I think Cayci and I were the only ones who LOL'd in the whole theater while everyone else was in complete shock.</blockquote>


I remember in 2004-2005 asking "Who is buying these loans? Who will be stuck NPA and bad debt losses with them when they turn?" Nobody had an answer. They did everything they could to obscure who was buying and how they were selling these assets from the regular investing public. Plus they were lying about their quality to the people they were selling it to because they were getting something "exclusive" (sounds more and more like Madoff all the time, huh?) - so color me shocked the general audience had no idea this was going on.



Okay, the shocked part was sarcasm, but for reals - how the hell would Joe Plumber know he should be pissed off before it colapsed? If I was asking questions and couldn?t get answers (as an investor) how exactly was the lay public supposed to know anything?



Over the past week I?ve been railing about a return to a big government heavily regulated financial market ? with an active and effective regulator that hasn?t been castrated by the wrong headed small government GOP types. I don?t want a ?command and control? economy any more than anybody else, but our move to deregulate these markets over the past 30 years has directly caused this problem, and I am flabbergasted that the GOP types suggest the solution to the failure of the regulator is to???.further deregulate in a quest for ?free markets??
 
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