The Inside Job (summary Essay)

The Inside Job documentary released in 2010, directed by Charles Ferguson is a detailed film about the US financial crisis in 2008. This was the second biggest crisis since the Great Depression. During this crisis Millions of people lost their jobs and homes. By doing substantial investigation and interviewing journalists, politicians, academics, and financial insiders, the film tries to find out what caused this financial crisis. This documentary is an excellent overview of the 2008 financial crisis because it provides detailed inspections of the events that led to the crisis. The film is separated into five parts, each explaining what happened during the crisis, and also shows interviews of people to follow the story from the US to Iceland.

This was an accomplished documentary. The film’s introduction shows the reduction of Iceland during their deregulation period. Within five years they went from ideal to poor. The film then moves forward to go after the events from the Raegan era deregulation to the fear of the collapse of insurance and banks. The film moves on to show their failure in the financial structure. The awful outcome of this is that no one went to jail; they all walked away with billions.

The Inside Job did an excellent job of showing that this Financial Crisis wasn’t an accident and that there were many people involved in this corruption. Regulators, Politicians, and Businessmen were involved. They knew that what they were doing was wrong but clearly didn’t care because their focus was on making money. They were making risky investments and lenders didn’t care if borrowers could repay so they started making risky loans. Therefore, this film leaves people in discouragement because it confirms that we cant trust any authority because most of what brought the economy down was not legal and done by people who worked within the economy.

This film is an excellent review of the financial crisis investigating the sequence of poor decisions, economic problems, and deregulations that led up to the financial crisis. It is divided into five parts; How we got there, The bubble, The crisis, Accountability, and Where are we now, mainly covering the misconduct of the United States by the financial industry. It also makes everything clear without the audience being confused. It reveals the failure that led to the crisis in a way that the audience can understand exactly what happened in a detailed way. This documentary shows a convincing analysis over scheme series.

To help the audience to make sense of this and understand what’s going on, Ferguson shows many engaging graphs and charts. Though the graphs are attractive, it doesn’t take away from the point they make throughout the documentary. These graphs are very informative that they cover mostly everything from investor earnings to rising costs. These graphs and charts further explain the message that the narrator is trying to deliver.

Though the inside job won one Oscar, there are still some problems within this documentary. After watching this movie and doing my research, I came across some interesting facts. Ferguson doesn’t mention or explain our economic system. This puts the audience attention somewhere other than where it needs to be. According to the Summers: “ Inside Job had all its facts wrong” article, Summers stated, “he didn’t work in financial services before he was treasury secretary.” Therefore, if they included this false statement how is the audience supposed to believe any other thing they said throughout the documentary? Based off this, everything else stated in the documentary could be false also. The film is very convincing but this evidence shows that the audience needs to do further research on the financial crisis.

In conclusion, The Inside Job documentary is an overview of the financial crisis. It is broken down into five parts, each explaining its own information. The documentary begins with the introduction showing the decline in the deregulation period. It then moves on to portray the actions that led to the crisis, explains the actual crisis in detail, and gives us a summary of where this crisis has left us. The financial crisis wasn’t an accident. It was caused by people who work for the economy doing illegal activity. Though this documentary does a great job of explaining this 2008 crisis, it also has some downfalls.

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