Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job

This weekend the San Francisco Chronicle caught up with a documentary Sasha first wrote about from Cannes.

“Inside Job” couldn’t be more prescient. Started just 19 months ago, the film is a searing examination of the financial crisis of 2007-10 and its catastrophic ramifications, not just for Americans but the world. The crisis spawned the loss of $20 trillion in investments and millions of jobs, and led to the worst recession since the Great Depression, the fall of global financial markets and perhaps the collapse of countries themselves.

This is a story that most people run from because the mind-numbing complexities of such political malfeasance, and conflicts of interest and outright criminal complicity are enough to explode the brain of a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, let alone someone who is trying to figure out the fine print on their mortgage or canceled credit card. Ferguson’s artistry is that he is able to plot a path through financial arcana that was set up to ensnare even the most nimble-minded financiers and criminal investigators.

At the end of the film festival, many critics cited Ferguson’s film as the clear documentary winner, with its surgically astute dissection of the greatest heist ever carried out against an unsuspecting public. One can surmise that revolutions have been started over political and financial crimes far less than those depicted in this film. When Sony releases “Inside Job” this fall, let’s hope that revolution will take the form of awareness, giving rise to a determination that this must never happen again.

Ferguson also hopes to drive home the point that throughout the financial crisis, “nobody has gone to prison despite fraud that caused trillions of dollars in losses.”

Several days ago Salon.com spoke with director Charles Ferguson, and ended the interview on grim note.

You have a fascinating conversation with Eliot Spitzer in the film, where you suggest that the financial sector has become an enormous criminal enterprise. You were talking just now about having been a high-tech entrepreneur, and what he says about the differences between the two worlds is very interesting.

I asked him about what seemed to be this very striking, distinctive, unique level of criminality in finance, which is not restricted to the behavior that led to this crisis. There have been many other examples of criminal behavior in finance. There are now three major banks that have been convicted of large-scale money laundering for Iran. Just a few days ago, ABN AMRO signed — I love this charming phrase — a “deferred prosecution agreement” and agreed to pay a $500 million fine because they did it too. So it’s an industry that has a very high level of criminality. It has become, I personally think, a criminal industry.

I asked Spitzer about that: Why this industry? I have some experience with high technology and the same thing doesn’t happen. He agreed with me, but we actually didn’t show his full answer. His full answer was: Look, high technology is an industry where you create money by doing something different. In contrast, finance is really kind of zero-sum. It’s a trading game, it’s a gambling game. There’s a relatively fixed pool of money, but there’s a lot of money and the way you make more, as a banker, is by making sure that someone else makes less. It’s really hard to keep that industry ethical without appropriate legal and regulatory controls. If Intel made microprocessors that blew up the computers they’re in, Intel would go out of business. The same is not true for financial services. It was a very sobering moment, actually.