Imagined Communities, Capitalism’s Periodic Crises, and the book Money, Power, and the People (2019); and films Hell or High Water (2016) / The Big Short (2015)
“Early twentieth-century practitioners of banking politics had envisioned a very different financial system. They privileged the economic security of working people. They hoped to establish an economy that was less susceptible to boom and bust. They opposed the centralized private financial power that is irreconcilable with democratic principles.”
—Christopher W. Shaw, “Epilogue,” Money, Power, and The People
“Most people think socialism is a set of laws that would more equally distribute wealth…The essence of socialism is that workers can use the collective organization that they have learned under capitalism to create not just cooperative workplaces but a cooperative society geared to make humanity’s needs instead of a competitive one geared to maximize profit.”
—Danny Katch, “Workers’ Power,” Socialism…Seriously: A Brief Guide to Surviving the 21st Century
Literature and the arts, such as dance, film, music, and painting, expand our visions and vocabularies, helping us to understand our own emotions and engagements as well as our larger experiences, including some of the institutions that inform, influence, and invigorate or inhibit us. We all hope the world will be home for us, of course, and when we find it is not, we begin to imagine change: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), a novel that was inspired by his brief participation in the Brook Farm project, is about a community founded on social ideals, and the narrative observer notices the limitations of persons and society as that communal dream is pursued. The conviction to create a community to fulfill social hopes and heal social ills—one that can be interpreted as abolitionist, feminist, socialist—is an admirable one, and is frustrated by human nature. Brook Farm, which had inspired Hawthorne’s community Blithedale, was founded by minister George Ripley in 1841 (the farm deed was signed, transferred, from the original owners Charles and Maria Ellis on October 11, 1841), with the intention that the farm community would be devoted to liberty, community, spirituality, work, and to a unity of flesh and spirit. Erik Reece’s book Utopia Parkway: A Road Trip through America’s Most Radical Idea (2016), a work of contemplation, reading, and travel, explores the history of Brook Farm and similar projects, and their identifying philosophical and social possibilities—imagined alternatives to conventions and institutions: an encounter with, and evaluation of, the near and the far, the ascetic and the sensual, the spiritual and the political, all trying to answer the question, How should we live?
The United States of America is a democratic capitalist society; and often the liberties it offers are constrained by financial restraints: capitalism is founded on supposedly free markets, on private property, acquisition, the exploitation of natural resources and labor, industry and the selling of products and services, and on an exalted selfishness. Much of that depends on the availability of capital—which is saved in banks and borrowed as loans. Yet, capitalism, despite its domination and success, has periodic crises: expansions and contractions, depressions and recession, falling profits, international competition, financial deceptions, ecological damage, government regulation, and class conflict.
Intelligently Haunting Films
One can doubt that there are more than a few films offering a critique of capitalism, but, actually, there are many, sometimes about banking, sometimes about business, sometimes about basic values, such as the direct analysis of industry and the exploitation of labor, in its national and international manifestations, in The Young Karl Marx (Raoul Peck, 2017); or the holiday favorite It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1947), in which we see the difference a caring banker can make—and the difference a ruthless businessman can make; or the more recent Margin Call (J.C. Chandor, 2011), focusing on a Wall Street investment bank during the 2008 financial crisis. Other films of fact or fiction on ethics and society include: American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000); Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2007); Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978); Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009); Cesar Chavez (Diego Luna, 2014); Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941); Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005); In Dubious Battle (James Franco, 2016); John Q (Nick Cassavetes, 2002); Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011); Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936); 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film (Nina Krstic, Audrey Ewell, others, 2013); Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979); Oh, Sun (Med Hondo, 1970); Parasite (Boon Joon-ho, 2019); Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018); Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2005); There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007); A Thousand and One Hands (Souheil Ben Barka, 1973); Twelve Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013); The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953); and Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987).
In The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013), Leonardo DiCaprio is Wall Street brokerage firm fraudster Jordan Belfort, a drunken, drugging, debaucher. As well, films such as The Assistant (Kitty Green, 2019), featuring college graduate Jane (Julia Garner), a shy, smart, and startled junior assistant who sees more and more abuse in the film production office she works in; and She Said (Maria Schrader, 2022), which follows two journalists, Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), as they rigorously investigate the Harvey Weinstein (Miramax executive) sexual harassment scandal, are illustrations of the particular vulnerabilities of women in business, particularly cinema. American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007) and The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) are illustrations of the criminal possibilities for those whose ambitions, culture, needs, and skills are ignored by established society. Of course, power and powerlessness, wealth and poverty, are international concerns; and some of the most relevant motion pictures were made in other countries; and like Percy vs. Goliath (Clark Johnson, 2020), featuring Christopher Walken as a Canadian canola farmer who fights Monsanto regarding genetically changed seeds (they charge him with theft of intellectual property), some films—the Iranian Children of Heaven (Majid Majidi, 1997), showing two children sharing sneakers to attend school using staggered schedules; the Japanese Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018), about poor workers who steal to augment their lives; and the British Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach, 2020), about a man’s precarious freelance package delivery job—are stories we recognize as part of daily life.
Crises in the System
One of the worst crises of capitalism occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, with the failure of many banks. “Conditions in rural America during the early 1930s were dire. Between 1929 and 1932, the net income of farmers fell 70 percent,” wrote Christopher W. Shaw in his book Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (University of Chicago Press, 2019; page 122); and “The numerous bank failures of the 1930s had been geographically concentrated in areas bearing the brunt of the agricultural depression. From 1921 to 1929, 70 percent of all suspensions occurred in twelve midwestern and southern agricultural states…The center of financial weakness shifted from rural to urban areas in late 1930, when large banks in cities began failing…Large depositors—including financial institutions and businesses—with access to inside information about weak and mismanaged banks removed their funds first” (page 136). There were calls for legal reforms, such as guaranty programs, insuring bank deposits, separating commercial and investment banks, regulating the stock market, and creating international monetary institutions. There were calls to nationalize the banking system—to bring it under government control.
During the Roosevelt administration, Congress passed the 1933 Emergency Banking Act, which instituted a bank holiday for auditing, allowed the Federal Reserve Bank to make more money available to banks and also brought banks that could meet their financial obligations under Treasury department supervision. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insured deposits up to $2,500, increasing public confidence, making panicked bank withdrawals unlikely (insurance authorized by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933). Franklin Roosevelt (1882 – 1945), one of the United States of America’s greatest and most controversial presidents, expanded presidential power, made the federal government larger, and more responsive to, and responsible for, its citizens, and brought forth other reforms: his administration—which included Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Frances Perkins, Daniel Roper, Henry Wallace, and William Woodin—initiated infrastructure and public works projects (bridges, dams, roads, libraries and other buildings), put young men to work on conservation projects, recognized the right to organize collectively as workers (labor unions), set minimum wages for industries and sometimes prices, created unemployment insurance, retirement and elder pensions, and disability benefits, and supported the arts and artists. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 also separated commercial banking from investment banking. Yet, panic and the accepted reforms do not seem to prevent future institutional abuses; and it is often the public that suffers.
The multiple crises of capitalism have included the high inflation of the 1970s when there was little economic growth, and the raising of oil prices and an Arab oil embargo, and monetary policies were indulgent, called the Great Inflation of the 1970s (fought with more stringent monetary policies); but stricter monetary policies led to less available investment and purchasing capital, and to the recessions of 1980 and 1981 – 1982; and both greater monetary regulation and stock trading conducted by computers led to a market crash, the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987 (traders, not regulators, had the technology; and markets were affected also in London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo; and the regulators’ remedy was to install circuit breakers to prevent selling through panic). In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was risky lending and high interest rates that caused a collapse of many savings and loan associations that handled mortgages and savings accounts; and in the early 2000s, technology companies were highly valued—until they were not, when investors doubted them, seeing they were not as profitable as expected, and investments began to languish, with many quickly selling their stocks, and companies went out of business. Of course, the global economy withered in 2008. The lives of ordinary people have been affected (through higher prices, job loss, decline in home value, and stress) by people making decisions in offices far away from where they live.
Are we free? Or are we too constrained by custom and law, by banking and business, by morality and religion? Can we become more free? There does seem to be a ruling class in America (as there is in most societies), but most of us do not have an intimate view of it, and, certainly, we are even less likely to be able to interrogate it. Many privileged and powerful insiders disguise themselves as outsiders. Often, we admire their glamour but do not identify the guilt of their association with bad policies and practices. Remarking on the disguised ruling class presence in government and business, Samuel Goldman, the director of the Politics and Values Program at George Washington University and literary editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review, opined in the March 30, 2021 New York Times, “An outsider pose is appealing because it allows powerful people to distance themselves from the consequences of their decisions. When things go well, they are happy to take credit. When they go badly, it’s useful to blame an incompetent, hostile establishment for thwarting their good intentions or visionary plans.” Samuel Goldman reminds us that consumption is not the same as control, and advises us to learn from public figures, past and present, while paying attention to their principles and practices: how ethical are their choices and the consequences of their choices?
The economist and writer Yanis Varoufakis has provided a diagnosis of today’s conflicts between the financial system and the public good: “Social democrats were able to make a difference during a time when power was vested in old-fashioned industrial capital. They acted as referees between organised labour and the captains of manufacturing industry, metaphorically (and occasionally literally) sitting them around a table, forcing them to compromise. The result was, on the one hand, improved wages and conditions for the workers and, on the other hand, the diversion of a chunk of industry’s profits to pensions, hospitals, schools, unemployment insurance and the arts. But as power shifted from industry to finance after the death of Bretton Woods in 1971, European social democrats and American Democrats alike were lured into a Faustian bargain with the bankers of Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt and Paris. The bargain was crude and simple: social democrats freed bankers from the shackles of regulation: ‘Go crazy! Regulate yourselves,’ they told them” (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Melville House, 2024; page 184).
What kind of society will free the human personality? What will allow us to live together with intelligence, with compassion, with joy? What will support opportunity and prosperity? How are hopes translated into purposes and practices that one can live with day by day? Knowledge of history, of crafts and skills. Free education. Respect for all forms of work. A respect for all cultures matched with criticality. An affirmation of the arts. Public forums for discussion. Equal justice for all. Mediation for conflicts. Rehabilitation for the wrongdoer. Shared resources. Consumer protections. Preservation of nature. Health care. We all have ideas of what makes a good society. In David Mackenzie’s film Hell or High Water (2016) and Adam McKay’s film The Big Short (2015) we see the corruption of banking and the failure of society: each film brings imagination to communities that exist in the world; and while The Big Short shows what bankers are like among themselves, Hell or High Water suggests the effects of their actions and policies on ordinary people.
Hell or High Water (2016) by David Mackenzie
Some stories have simple elements—hope, exploitation, injustice; sacrifice, struggle, suffering; rebellion and retribution—that suggest a more significant subject or theme: and something that might appear to affect one family turns out to affect us all. In David Mackenzie’s film Hell or High Water (2016), with a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, two brothers, with differing temperaments (one has been law-abiding, the other criminal), join together to rob small Texas banks of unmarked cash, after their mother’s illness and death; they are collecting money to pay off mortgage taxes, and other debt related to the family home and land (which the bank is threatening to repossess—and on which oil has been discovered). The good brother wants to leave a legacy for his sons—and the bad brother is doing this because his brother asked (and he enjoys the adventure). The more time we spend with the brothers, the more we see how their family’s vulnerability mirrors that of other people; and the banking system’s principles, policies, and practices are called into question.
Hell or High Water dramatizes how an inequal system—bureaucracy, legalese, inequalities, and poverty—can entangle and control people’s destinies and how desperation can lead to violations of character and law. The story, set in West Texas, is a cops and robbers movie, a western, and a family drama; and it was photographed by Giles Nuttgens, with production design by Tom Duffield, art direction by Steve Cooper, set decoration by Wilhelm Pfau, and edited by Jake Roberts, with music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. It features Texas rangers Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) in chase of the brothers Toby Howard (Chris Pine) and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster). It is particularly about policing intelligence (Bridges) against criminal intelligence (that of Pine, as the good brother—now breaking the law).
Jeff Bridges may now be a comfortable legend, having been in a wide range of comedies and dramas of differing styles, from the television shows Sea Hunt (1958 – 1960) and The Lloyd Bridges Show (1962 – 1963) to films such The Last Picture Show (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Jagged Edge (1985), Tucker (1988), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Fisher King (1991), and, among many others, The Big Lebowski (1998) and Crazy Heart (2009). Bridges’ character in Hell or High Water realizes the brothers are robbing different branches of the same bank (although he does not realize yet that the bank also holds the mortgage to their family property). “What is mysterious is how Bridges manages to go beyond the movie’s plot. In his immersed and immersive kind of acting, the angle of his slouch and the tilt of his head are as eloquent and startling as the unpredictable arc of a sentence by Mark Twain. He creates a comic essay about friendship from the way he slumps on a motel chair next to a six-pack and grouses about Alberto lying in bed and watching a TV preacher. (Birmingham partners him perfectly, with a hidden half-smile.) Bridges conjures a haunting tableau of homegrown brilliance as Marcus wraps a blanket around his torso and spends a night brooding on a porch chair,” wrote Michael Sragow in “Deep Focus: Jeff Bridges and Hell or High Water,” Film Comment (August 25, 2016). Bridges is well-matched by the easily likable blue-eyed Chris Pine, who has been in television projects and motion pictures such as the Star Trek films (2009, 2013, 2016) and Into the Woods (2014), Z for Zachariah (2015), and two Wonder Woman films (2017, 2020), as well as his own directorial project Poolman (2023). “Pine threads scarlet rage into Toby’s grey demeanor,” wrote Sragow (Film Comment, August 25, 2016).
Gil Birmingham, who has Comanche ancestry, as the Native ranger, Parker, comments on the lack of opportunity in the small towns, in how the land has been in different hands over time—how different people have played the part of owner and dispossessed. The people who took the land from the Natives are now having the land taken from them by the banks and large companies. Birmingham, himself born in Texas, attended the University of Southern California, where he received a bachelor of science degree (he worked as a petrochemical engineer, before appearing in Diana Ross’s 1982 “Muscles” video and getting roles in the television serials Falcon Crest (1987) and The Legend of Calamity Jane (1997) and films such as The Doe Boy (2001), Skins (2002), and the Twilight series (2008 – 2012); and recently he has been seen in Te Ata (2016), Wind River (2017), and the television series Yellowstone (2018 – 2022).
Something large is being seen through a story of two obscure brothers. The film captures the gun culture of Texas—in one scene bystanders pull out their guns to shoot at the robber brothers. A reflexive gesture. Yet, some people do not want to help the police capture the men—who seem ordinary working guys pushed to extremes, guys aware of the suffering or difficulties of others (the brothers give a waitress a large tip). Some of the townsmen think of the local branches of the bank as being part of a thievery corporation.
The good brother, Toby Howard (Pine), has an ex-wife, who seems bitter and does not expect much from him (one imagines romance became disappointment, as Toby’s intelligence, love, and potential were not fulfilled). One of Toby’s sons is developing some individuality, but seems respectful, caring—willing to believe in his father, who tells him to become his own man, a better man than the father has been. (The bad brother, Ben Foster’s Tanner, who is dangerously impulsive with a long history of malfeasance, does not expect any kind of redemption or transcendence.) “Hell or High Water merges the excitement of a crime-spree noir with a haunting undertow of family history and destiny,” commented reviewer Owen Gleiberman in Variety (May 16, 2016). Meanwhile, the two Texas rangers, Marcus Hamilton (Bridges) and Alberto Parker (Birmingham), have a bantering relationship—direct and implied put-downs. Some of the comments by Bridges’ Hamilton, are ethnic (Native) jokes, jibes—which Birmingham’s Parker volleys and sometimes seems to despair of hearing again. “That Hell or High Water makes you empathize with and understand (though not excuse) each member of this disparate quartet is a tribute to the way Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay works equally well as a thriller, character study and pointed social commentary,” wrote Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times (August 10, 2016).
The ending—of both loss and triumph (good and evil have a cost)—has a certain ambiguity. Bridges and Pine’s characters, Marcus Hamilton and Toby Howard, have a cordial conversation that is suggestive, with an implied threat: each suggests he might offer the other peace—is “peace” resolution or death? Hell or High Water looks good, moves well, is believable—one watches it both aware of the particular story being told and of the larger society and its contradictions.
The Big Short (2015) by Adam McKay
Banking was a dull enterprise in the 1970s. Lewis Raineri / Salomon Brothers changed that—with mortgage-backed securities bundled as bonds; which added opportunity and danger to banking—and led to a financial crisis, which a few marginal people anticipated, we are told at the beginning of Adam McKay’s satirical expose, The Big Short, a film adaptation of a book by journalist Michael Lewis, who often documents the promise, power, and perversities of our institutions. Michael Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker (1989), The Money Culture (1991), Moneyball (2003), The Blind Side (2006), Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (2011), The Fifth Risk (2018), and The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021). Adam McKay has directed broad comedies, and, more recently, the films Vice (2018), about Dick Cheney, and Don’t Look Up (2021), a satire about a comet hurtling toward the planet threatening human extinction. McKay has made something surprising of Michael Lewis’s interesting finance world study, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W.W. Norton, 2010). Michael Lewis, looking into the 2008 international financial crisis and those who anticipated it, found outsiders, eccentrics, analysts. Filmmaker Adam McKay utilizes the resources of film—the ability to condense time, and present more than one perspective, and affect different tones (comedy and drama)—and allows us to see that economic crisis anew, with greater understanding. The motion picture, which has a screenplay by director McKay with book author Michael Lewis and Charles Randolph, has aspects of both drama and documentary, and was photographed by Barry Ackroyd, with production design by Clayton Hartley, art direction by Elliott Glick, set decoration by Susan Ogu and Linda Lee Sutton, and it was edited by Hank Corwin, with music by Nicholas Britell.
In The Big Short, one man, actor Christian Bale’s character, Dr. Michael Burry, recalls the 1930s housing market collapse, the inability to pay debt, the fraud. The unique Michael Burry—a physician, a hedge fund manager (and a self-diagnosed person with Asperger’s syndrome, which explains his social stiffness)—sees the highest fraud rate since Great Depression. Bale, who has appeared in Empire of the Sun (1987), Little Women (19994), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and Laurel Canyon (2002), among many other films, gives Michael Burry a flinty, single-minded certainty. Dr. Burry, who has one glass eye as a result of a childhood accident, is a manager at the hedge fund Scion Capital; and he wants to know what mortgages are in each top selling mortgage bond (he asks a new hire to find out, after an awkward conversation).
Another man, a trust fund manager, Mark Baum (Steve Carrell), comes into the office of his FrontPoint Partners trading group complaining about bank overdraft policy: banks charge for checks made against accounts with inadequate balances (processing checks instead of holding them until deposits are made, an exploitive pattern). Mark Baum is displeased by how the financial system works in ways both large and small—and he sees the corrosive effect on human relations, on human character. Baum (Carell) is an alias for a real person: Steve Eisman, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law, and managed $1 billion for FrontPoint. (He was known to be abrasive.) “Carell’s Baum is capable of sitting still and focusing for short amounts of time but not of keeping his thoughts to himself. He always looks as if he is itchy in his skin and smelling bad things. It’s a wonderful performance—peerlessly antsy. But the whole cast is terrific,” observed critic David Edelstein of New York magazine (November 29, 2015).
The hedge fund manager Dr. Michael Burry (Bale) wants to short housing market stock (betting the value of real estate will lessen)—against Alan Greenspan’s and the industry’s claim that the market is solid. Has Burry noticed a weakness not seen by the reputed experts? How does the market really work? The glamorous actress Margot Robbie, in a bubble bath, explains how mortgages work as investment—riskier and riskier mortgages (subprime mortgages) are put into bonds for sale. We know that Michael Burry (Bale) wants to bet against that market of bad loans, but he has to get a bank to create an instrument to allow him to bet against the market—and he does: credit default swaps. Burry (Bale) starts with six mortgage-backed securities he wants to short, getting the bank to insure payment even if the bank becomes insolvent. Burry makes a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars with several banks. That is a major investment, a bet on the likely failure of a market—but he is required to pay monthly premiums for this deal. The strange logic of the investment market begins to seem convoluted nonsense. The film is inspired instruction: “McKay approaches this adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book with wit, energy and a surprising degree of clarity. But if the movie is a crackerjack entertainment, it’s one with a conscience. McKay invites us to laugh at the meltdown’s abundant absurdity but makes sure the bitterness of the joke lingers,” surmised Stephanie Zacharek in Time magazine (December 3, 2015).
Meanwhile, FrontPoint, the unit of Mark Baum (Carrell), is a small part of Morgan Stanley, and is made up of a group of trusted idiosyncratic colleagues: Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Vinny Daniel (Jeremy Strong)—and, a wrong number from trader Jared Vennett’s assistant gives them a clue about shorting the housing market. Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) is a major bank securities trader, and Vennett explains how riskier the bonds have gotten—and the creation of collateralized debt obligations (bundling bad bonds together). There is a meeting between FrontPoint and Vennett (Gosling); and after the Vennett meeting, Baum asks his crew: “Is there a housing bubble? How exposed are the banks?”
There are two young financial world observers, Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) of Brownfield, a new group, who want to form a partnership with a larger firm to do more business investing. They, Geller and Shipley, learn of Vennett’s claims regarding very risky bonds—and that the nature of those risks is registering with few people. People underestimate risks—and the Brownfield team, Geller (Magaro) and Shipley (Wittrock), bets on those risks being fulfilled, having an effect. Geller and Shipley bring a boyish enthusiasm to sharp-minded plotting. They contact the retired but still connected trader Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), who seems rather serene (beneath his glasses and longish hair), but Rickert (Pitt), too, is also cynical about the banking system—Geller and Shipley want him to act as a connector for them.
How to confirm that there is a housing bubble? Two FrontPoint guys visit a housing development and find abandoned houses, landlord fraud (those houses were part of an imagined community that did not become real). Investments have been made in new homes that no one buys. How exposed are the banks? FrontPoint meets with a real estate agent and mortgage brokers—to better understand the market. Consequently, Mark Baum invests in credit default swaps. Parallel, Ben Rickert (Pitt) advises Charlie (John Magaro) and Jamie (Finn Wittrock) about Vennett’s analysis—and agrees that the market is faulty. Ben Rickert (Pitt) is willing to help them, Charlie and Jamie, get an International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) agreement with a larger firm.
2007. People begin to default on loans, but the financial securities are built on loans that remain highly rated because rating agencies are in collusion with banks (banks pay fees for the ratings). How dumb is the big money? The banks do not recognize the self-deception. At the American Securitization Forum in Vegas, various financial world speculators attend to find out: How dumb is the big money? Brownfield, Front Point, go to find out. In Vegas, there is obliviousness and cynicism. Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is frustrated by the insanity—bonds have value despite the failed loans they contain. “Moral duty and comedy aren’t usually the comfiest of bedfellows, but McKay—best known for his dumb-and-proud comic collaborations with Will Ferrell, including Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and the Anchorman movies—mingles righteous outrage with intermittent fits of giggling” noted Dana Stevens of the online publication Slate (December 10, 2015). The Brownfield duo, Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley, decide to bet against AA securities (original negotiable or non-negotiable agreements)—which are supposed to be good but which they guess are not. Rickert (Pitt) reminds Jamie (Wittrock) and Charlie (Magaro) that people lose jobs and homes if they are right. The film, thus, encourages us to see more than one perspective at a time—that of the bankers, that of the speculators, and those who will suffer the consequences. “The Big Short is the truth-telling picture of the year. It puts beautifully shaded characters in guy comedy mode into an Altman-esque narrative, shot counter to type by Ken Loach’s cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd,” wrote reviewer Harlan Jacobson in the January-February 2016 Film Comment magazine.
In a documentary aside, Dr. Richard Thaler, behavioral economics scholar, and Selena Gomez—explain synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO), representing different loans bundled together, at a poker table: betting on bets, on outcomes; betting on improbable losses (with big payoffs to come if they occur).
The angry Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) hates the corruption of the financial system—he is disturbed by what happened to his brother (suicide attempt), too. Mark Baum (Carrell) is disheartened, but bets further against the system; and he talks about how he failed his brother—who confessed his sadness and to whom Baum offered money as help—and his brother committed suicide (“his face was so smashed,” Baum recalls). Dr. Burry drafts letters to his investors saying that the mortgage bond market is fraudulent and that he is forbidding withdrawals from his investment commitment. (He will manage accounts coolly, without hysteria.) Firms begin filing for bankruptcy as the economic slowdown occurs.
Risk and reaction: “How can an insurance contract not be affected by the demise of the thing it insures?” asks Burry (Bale) of a banker—who avoided his calls for a week. The banks are trying to cover their investments—trying to sell their investments before the news gets out. Brownfield (Charlie, Jamie’s firm) wants to sell $200 million in credit default swaps; and Rickert (Pitt) handles the selling. They get $80 million.
FrontPoint is part of Morgan Stanley, and Mark Baum (Carrell) learns of Morgan Stanley’s multi-billion-dollar exposure (he speaks with Kathy Tao, played by the Nigerian-American actress Adepero Oduye, who supervises his fund and would like access to his bet on the collapse of the mortgage market); the larger company’s possible loss is about $15 billion. Yet, some banks are considered too big to fail—too many assets, too intertwined in the national economy. There is a debate over facts and policies in a public forum: a Baum versus fund manager Bruce Miller debate, in which Baum denies that Bear Stearns is solid as claimed, and he denounces fraud. As the debate goes on, Bear Stearns stock goes down. Lehman Brothers stock goes to zero. Burry (Bale) makes money for his investors, but thinks banking is corrosive, and closes down his fund.
Consequently, there is a government bailout of the banks. Yet, $5 trillion in value—real estate, pensions, bonds, etc.—disappeared; and there were 8 million lost jobs; 6 million lost homes in the U.S. The catastrophic effects are felt, were felt, around the world.
Engaging an Expert
The Brook Farm project of the 19th century was one of many attempts in America and the world to begin to build a new society, one more sensitive to human hopes, to the requirements of the mind and spirit. We ask some of the same questions today that were asked by the people who attempted that experiment years ago. How should we live? Are we free? Or are we too constrained by custom and law, by banking and business, by morality and religion? “The three basic classes in capitalist society—capitalist and working classes, with the middle class in between—are not the end of the story. There is above them all a ruling class. This class is composed of the most influential people in the country, who participate in the networks of power that shape society. While the capitalist class is composed of those with strategic power in their own business, the ruling class operates at a different level, providing overall strategic direction for broad swaths of society. It involves a small number of capitalists, and it includes people who are in position to coordinate activity across industries and establish political and cultural norms…The ruling class also includes top government officials—members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the president and top cabinet officers,” wrote economist Michael Zweig in his book Class, Race, and Gender (PM Press, 2023; page 98).
How likely is it that we can discover all that constrains us, personally, philosophically, professionally, politically? In a democratic capitalist nation, the financial system is one of great power—and the banking system has been an important part of that. Can we become more free? “Although the lack of popular engagement with banking issues at the dawn of the twenty-first century was unmistakable, Americans were ensnared in home mortgages, student debt, credit cards, car loans, and numerous other forms of indebtedness. Moreover, as working people confronted rising economic insecurity, they relied on credit. Millions of Americans found themselves virtual prisoners of their creditors, trapped in a cycle of debt. And increasingly a mere handful of large banks presided over these financial fetters. The six largest banking corporations held assets equivalent to 55 percent of GDP in 2006, up from 17 percent in 1995. Following the massive 2008 financial bailout, the assets these six companies held rose to 63 percent,” wrote Christopher W. Shaw, in “Epilogue,” in his book Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (University of Chicago Press, 2019; page 300).
Some time ago, I was alert to the fact that some of my concerns, like that of many, can be more romantic than realistic; and that made me want to research and think more about banking, law, and justice, as well as the challenges of nature and the necessity of science. Some of these matters are universal. In recent years, matters of great importance have crossed barriers and borders of various kinds: whether climate change or a pandemic or an unexpected war, national borders, and barriers between the public and private, have been blurred. I decided to ask some questions of author Christopher W. Shaw (Money, Power, and the People). His 2019 University of Chicago Press book on the history of banking in America gives an intricately detailed portrait of the development, disciplining, and devious powers of banks, and is very illuminating. “His book offers a powerful lesson in what mass democratic politics can accomplish when people pay attention to the laws and institutions that govern how money is made and channeled,” wrote reviewer Ariel Ron in “Monetary Democracy” in the Fall 2020 issue of Dissent magazine. Christopher Shaw accepted my invitation and answered some of my questions, although I would like to have known more about his personal history, his sense of America’s ruling class, and of the international matters that intersect with the world of finance (questioned asked, left unanswered).
Questions for Christopher W. Shaw, author of Money, Power, and the People
Garrett: Who are some of the historians, and which are some of the books, you most value?
Shaw: To make this answer more manageable I’ll discuss some authors who are deceased, since they’re no longer around to talk about their work. I value Studs Terkel’s oral history collections. Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History is a compelling interpretation of the past 500 years of world history. There are a number of British historians whose work I appreciate, including R. H. Tawney, E. J. Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, George Rudé, and R. H. Hilton. For American history, I’ll limit myself to mentioning two books with connections to the University of California, Berkeley—where I received my doctorate in history—Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet and Ronald Takaki’s Pau Hana.
Garrett: Christopher Shaw, in your book, Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (University of Chicago, 2019), you write in the introduction “The historical development American capitalism allotted elite private financial interest a privileged position that circumscribed policy debates among state officials” (page 11), yet you acknowledge, and document, various civic and public interest actors who also influenced policies. (Why was the latter history so long neglected?) The great wealth of individuals and families, and the private ownership of the means of production, the profit motif as principal goal and justifier are what most of us think of when contemplating capitalism, and we are so surrounded by the prestige and power of capital that it is very difficult to imagine anything else, despite the perpetual crises of capitalism brought forth by various causes, whether diminishment of cash or credit, bad investments, technological changes, product scarcity, corruption, war, or loss of faith in the banking system. Why do we accept the cycles of growth and grim reversals as natural, inevitable?
Shaw: The history of the influence that working people exerted on the banking and monetary system during the early twentieth century was untold by historians because the prevailing assumption was that bankers, politicians, and government officials were the actors who mattered. This denial of the role of grassroots banking politics meant the history of American finance omitted an essential part of the story. My book Money, Power, and the People recovers this history, including the fact that working people in the early twentieth century didn’t accept an unstable economy as inevitable, and successfully pushed to reform finance in order to curb the frequent depressions that were characteristic of the American economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But as banking politics waned later in the twentieth century this idea of inevitable instability returned.
Garrett: Conservatism has often been extreme in recent years, indulging in demagoguery and prejudice, but with the 2020 Library of America book American Conservatism: Reclaiming a Tradition, editor Andrew J. Bacevich has presented another view, one that includes Henry Adams, Randolph Bourne, Zora Neale Hurston, and Joan Didion, as well as William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Do you know the book?
Shaw: While I haven’t read that book, I do agree that it’s a mistake to dismiss conservatism as hatred and reaction. Conservatism in the Burkean tradition is worthy of serious attention from people of all political persuasions.
Garrett: Films such as The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015) and Margin Call (J.C. Chandor, 2011) dramatized some of the dynamics that led to the international financial crisis of 2008. Can you think of other films, past or present, that articulate financial issues and problems with clarity, insight, or poignancy?
Shaw: Surprisingly it’s a comedy, but the W. C. Fields movie The Bank Dick (Edward Cline, Ralph Ceder, 1940) shows why banks need regulation, with a bank examiner named J. Pinkerton Snoopington arriving to inspect the books shortly after embezzlement has occurred. The bank run scene in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) provides an accessible lesson on how banks work. As president of a local savings and loan association that helps struggling working people achieve their dreams of homeownership, the character that Jimmy Stewart portrays also illustrates the difference that community-minded finance can make, especially in comparison to the owner of the town’s largest bank—the greedy Mr. Potter.
As my book documents, negative public attitudes toward bankers like Potter prevailed in the early twentieth century, and this perspective appeared on the silver screen. The Preston Sturges film The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) starring Harold Lloyd includes a scene that revolves around the public’s disdain of bankers. During the Great Depression, even a Gene Autry picture—Red River Valley (B. Reeves Eason, 1936)—featured the singing cowboy doing battle with a villainous banker intent on stealing land from local ranchers.
This critical perspective on bankers was addressed in a more sophisticated manner in John Ford’s famous screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940). In the scene where the home of the Joads—hard-pressed Dust Bowl refugees—is bulldozed, the cause of their plight is traced through impersonal forces, but the chain points toward Wall Street. While banking has featured in both documentaries and films set on Wall Street in recent years, in 2016 Hollywood updated the criticisms of earlier films in Hell or High Water, which I recommend watching.
Garrett: What did you make of Occupy Wall Street?
Shaw: Before Occupy Wall Street the political Left generally was uninterested in finance. Occupy got a lot of people thinking about finance while significantly raising the political salience of inequality.
Garrett: Much of history concerns not only facts and events, but possibilities that were not pursued, or that were defeated; and in the book Money, Power, and the People (University of Chicago Press, 2019), you write of the American economic crisis of the 1930s, and that “Demands to overhaul American finance were routine” (page 149), with proposals to reform the banking system, and to create new opportunities with public interest banking, encompassing city and state banks, and even banks affiliated with labor organizations. How might things have been different if the balance of power between banks with profit motives and those devoted to public interest had been different?
Shaw: The establishment of public banks would have meant less emphasis on speculation and short-term decision making. Also, less nickel-and-diming of consumers. More broadly, removing profit maximization as the motive for bank operations would have opened up new possibilities for thinking in creative ways about the function and purpose of banking.
Garrett: Labor union membership continues to decline, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Do you think anything can be done to change this, to increase membership and the power of ordinary workers?
Shaw: There have been some very hopeful developments recently. Workers in multiple Starbucks locations in Buffalo and Ithaca, New York, have organized unions, and—even more remarkably—Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island have organized as well. New York State is a union stronghold, so we’ll see to what extent this momentum spreads. President Biden has said he wants to be “the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” His pro-union position appears to be making some difference. One of the greatest obstacles unions face is that labor law is biased in favor of employers. But the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel recently moved against employers requiring their workers to attend anti-union meetings. Removing this form of intimidation during organizing campaigns would help level the playing field for unions.
Garrett: Do you see any positive economic alternatives in other countries?
Shaw: The Scandinavians have achieved an impressive combination of high living standards and a high degree of economic equality. The Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain are worth studying. Japan may teach us important lessons about how to operate a more sustainable economy.
Garrett: The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 maintained a border between savings banks and investment banks, as a way of protecting the funds of ordinary citizens; but, as industry grew without the corresponding wealth of ordinary people, there began to be more social frustration, and both Republican and Democratic presidents, principally Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, had a top-down approach: they thought that if more investments could be made in business, if there could be more bank products and services beyond state lines, more loans, less federal control, there would be more spending and some of that would trickle down. Bill Clinton’s administration, with Congress, eliminated the Glass-Steagall Act (through the Riegle–Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act on September 29, 1994). As with the elimination of other regulations—such as the 1987 Federal Communications Commission repeal of the 1948 fairness doctrine which insisted on fair coverage of important and controversial public matters, or the 2020 Supreme Court Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case, which allowed more corporate spending in elections—the consequence of the Glass-Steagall repeal has been a more chaotic political environment. Is there any going back?
Shaw: Actually, Glass-Steagall was eliminated by the 1999 Financial Service Modernization Act, not the 1994 Riegle–Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act. Glass-Steagall is a great example of the sort of banking policies that used to be largely unknown outside of banking circles. But following the 2008 financial crisis, its importance became much more widely understood. High-profile politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren talk about Glass-Steagall regularly. My book Money, Power, and the People shows that organized people can win reforms that bankers oppose, so financial safeguards like Glass-Steagall can be achieved again today.
Garrett: There are different standards of value—aesthetic, intellectual, moral, sentimental. Money is a method of exchange, a standard of value, a resource, and it is a part of most conversations about public and private life—and it recurs as a subject in songs, such as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” by Bing Crosby, and “The Jolly Banker” by Woody Guthrie, or “(Money) Can’t Buy Me Love” by the Beatles, and “Money” by Pink Floyd, or “All About the Benjamins” by Puff Daddy. Are there songs that you find particularly articulate regarding the subject of money?
Shaw: In their song “Money (That's What I Want),” Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford stated the bottom line in regard to money: we need it to pay the bills. And while the Kingston Trio suggested the possibility of escaping this circumstance in “Greenback Dollar,” Wynn Stewart summed up how most people experience this imperative in “Another Day, Another Dollar.”
Many songs raise vital criticisms of money. Superficially, AC/DC’s “Moneytalks” sounds celebratory of wealth, but it’s actually cynical about what money does to people and what people do with money. The O’Jays song “For the Love of Money” delivers an explicit broadside against how money corrupts people. Other musicians stress what money can’t buy, referencing the spiritual, such as Prince in “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” and the Beatles in “Can’t Buy Me Love”—although, demonstrating their diversity, they also recorded “Money (That’s What I Want).”
Questions about the distribution of money are another theme of songs that shed light on the subject. In “Money for Nothing,” Dire Straits juxtaposes the amount of money that workingmen and rock stars have and the labor they perform to obtain that money. In the tradition of the banking politics found in my book, Jim Garland’s “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister” condemns those who control money, contrasting their wasteful use of the wealth that working people create with the deprivation and vulnerability experienced by workers who lack money.
Garrett: “After decades of relative financial stability, bankers achieved political victories that ushered in a more volatile economic order. Deregulatory reforms encouraged bankers to take speculative risks, rather than exercise prudence,” you write near the end of your book Money, Power, and the People (page 292). The American banking system is notoriously complex, full of participants, managers, and regulators, and yet, often, it all seems to go in one direction—mainly servicing the wealthy and powerful, regardless of social effects. What are some of the avenues, resources, and proposals for possible progressive change?
Shaw: Discussions about public banking and postal banking were central to creating the early twentieth-century financial reform movement documented in Money, Power, and the People, and those ideas are being discussed seriously again. Organized people can defeat organized money, so the question is, how do you organize people around financial policy issues? It’s noteworthy that such political activity is currently underway, with groups that are specifically focused on public banks operating in a number of states. They have achieved some notable successes in California.
Garrett: What are some of your hopes, and expectations, for the future?
Shaw: The financialization of the economy makes it especially likely that political struggles over the banking and monetary system will continue in the future. Hopefully public engagement on these questions will measure up to the banking politics of earlier generations.
Literature and the arts expand our visions and vocabularies, but they have much competition for our attentions—and cannot have quite the same force they had in a simpler past. Works such as The Big Short (2015) and Hell or High Water (2016) can help us to see phenomena that we might not have seen or understood as well without them, but they no longer represent the most significant cultural authorities as we consider our liberties and our limitations—and, some of us observe that populations in different nations, and sometimes our own, choose to pursue illiberal democracy and even authoritarianism. Another element that we must confront is the pervasive presence of computers, and of artificial intelligence, in our world, now and in the future: so much is linked, so much is surveillance, so much is pure exploitation. The economist Yanis Varoufakis has discussed this as a form of technofeudalism: “It is tempting to think that it does not really matter what we call the system we live in. Technofeudalism or hyper-capitalism, the system is what it is, whatever the word we use to describe it” (page 119); and he goes on to explain, “Just as capitalism pushed aside feudalism by replacing land with capital as the dominant factor of production, so too did technofeudalism ride in to displace capitalism on the coat-tails of cloud capital—a mutation of (standard, terrestrial) capital” (page 234); and “Cloud capital is, physically, defined as the agglomeration of networked machinery, software, AI-driven algorithms and communications hardware criss-crossing the whole planet and performing a variety of tasks, new and old,” (page 234), in his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2024, originally published by The Bodley Head in 2023). Have we gone too far to recover?
(Submitted 4/2025)
