A week ago, the UNC Global Research Institute hosted an interview with Larry Summers, the director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council.
He was interview by Bill Harrison Jr., former CEO of JPMorgan Chase, one of the biggest banks in the U.S. This interview was supposedly a response to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s talk, also hosted at UNC, earlier this year.
And if you don’t understand why all of this is so problematic, you need to watch “Inside Job” as soon as possible.
The fact is, as this lively and enlightening documentary explains, the very people who caused our current recession never really left the reins of economic policy. Between the market fundamentalists of the Reagan and Bush years and the corporatist compromises of the Clinton and Obama administrations, there is hardly anything to choose from.
Paulson out, Summers in — and as one commentator in the film says, it’s all “a Wall Street government.”
Still, “Inside Job” isn’t your typical rabble-rousing populism. It may have a hearty pot of righteous anger simmering on its cinematic stove, but it’s also full of detailed explanations of what actually went wrong with the housing bubble and derivatives market.
Plenty of those detailed explanations come from interviews with economic analysts and would be reformers such as Eliot Spitzer, who, while definitely an insider himself, at least tried to warn us where we were heading before it was too late.
Not all the film’s interviews are with the nice guys though, and it’s these that Matt Damon, as narrator, handles like a champ. Though he’s informed enough to hold his own with the lying, prevaricating pricks he interviews, he’s mostly content to sit back and let them implicate themselves with their greed and nastiness.
And what about those other establishment figures, like Summers and Paulson? Though their parts in the recession and their double lives as profiteering consultants are well documented in the film, you won’t see them get a one-on-one grilling here.
