Crisis
A few months ago I decided to make a trip to the local theater to check out a new release called the Big Short. The trailer played all over primetime and made the movie look very interesting. It was based on a true story and the plot was the mortgage crisis our country witnessed in 2008. I have always been interested in how the Wall Street money market works and how people make and lose millions every day. I myself play with a few stocks once and awhile but nothing too fancy. The mortgage crisis didn’t affect me as much as it did too many other Americans, I guess I can say I made good out of the whole situation. I purchased a home in 2015 as our country was still recovering from the crisis. Not sure how accurate the movie
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A few scenes in the movie the Big Short capture many realtors and lenders not really focused on the long run for many homeowners, it was more about the present and making that easy money. A very interesting part of these loans was how Wall Street invested in these loans; they were called “A” bond and “B” bonds. The way it was explained was pretty simple. “A” bonds were the loans with good credit and those loans with good standing, “B” bonds were the loans that were shitty, you were at a higher risk of losing money as an investor with a B bond investment. The money was in the “A” bonds, well that’s what we all thought. What banks eventually started to do, was mixing the bad loans or high risk loans in the “A” bonds. Investors and Wall Street were unaware of this fraud going on. Until a man named Michael Burry played by Christian Bale started diving deep into these bonds and noticed the inconsistency of the loans in each one. Not only did he report this but eventually he decides to bet against the banks since he knew the truth (The Big Short film). The way he bet against these “A” bonds was like having an insurance policy, he would pay premium rates to the bank, the banks thought he was a fool and they took his money for years thinking it would never happen and he was just a crazy man
Jared
The opportunity for power and competition seems to also be one of the largest intersecting parts of this whole debacle. In the film, I heard and saw that these bankers placed bets on the crash of all the loans. These bankers knowingly put countless families and individuals in
In the movie the big short, Lewis Ranieri, who is a banker of the Wall Street, created an idea that companies packed thousands of mortgage all bundled together to sell, which is the AAA credit-rating bond, and can obtain high yields with low risk because everyone should pay for their mortgage. The concept of Lewis Ranieri is called mortgage-backed securities (MBS). However, the demand of buying MBS is more than MBS supply. Therefore, when the risk of MBS is high, Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) is a way to change subprime loans to high- rating bonds and it can be sold again. Although CDO is full of subprime loans, it still can get AAA rating because
The movie takes place in the early 1990’s, when Jordan Belfort partners with Donny Azoff to start his brokerage firm, Stratford-Oakmont. After the introduction given by Jordan, we follow his life from the time that he is 22 years old when he had just started on wall street, all the way to the time of his arrest. Throughout the movie, you can see Jordan’s narcissistic personality aid him in his rise to the top and eventually lead to his fall.
The Movie that I choose to analyze was the movie The Wolf of Wall Street this movie is about a guy who is starting off his career wanting to earn money fast so he goes to Wall Street and works as a broker for a small firm, where he ends up picking up bad advice along with some bad habits that get him rich fast, but not in a very ethical way. Some of the main characters that I will be talking about in this essay are Jordan Belfort also referred to as Jordy, he is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Donnie Azoff Played by Jonah Hill. There are many other characters in this movie, but these are the main characters that are faced with difficult dilemmas. A lot of the choices that are made in this movie are Unethical. Even though it seems that he does everything for greed you end up understanding the reasons he did those things, but even though they are done for the right reasons does not mean it is right.
The housing crisis of the late 2000s rocked the economy and changed the landscape of the real estate business for years to come. Decades of people purchasing houses unfordable houses and properties with lenient loans policies led to a collective housing bubble. When the banking system faltered and the economy wilted, interest rates were raised, mortgages increased, and people lost their jobs amidst the chaos. This all culminated in tens of thousands of American losing their houses to foreclosures and short sales, as they could no longer afford the mortgage payments on their homes. The United States entered a recession and homeownership no longer appeared to be a feasible goal as many questioned whether the country could continue to support a middle-class. Former home owners became renters and in some cases homeless as the American Dream was delayed with no foreseeable return. While the future of the economy looked bleak, conditions gradually improved. American citizens regained their jobs, the United States government bailed out the banking industry, and regulations were put in place to deter such events as the mortgage crash from ever taking place again. The path to homeowner ship has been forever altered, as loans in general are now more difficult to acquire and can be accompanied by a substantial down payment.
Then, in the 1990s, bonds were created consisting of subprime mortgages, which were higher risk mortgages with high interest rates, made to borrowers with lower credit levels. Essentially, banks were handing out mortgages like candy to consumers who were never going to be able to make the payments, but Wall Street kept buying and packaging the mortgages into bonds. Since these bonds were inherently riskier, one wonders why investors were still willing to buy. Investors, who look at ratings by agencies such as Moodys and Standard & Poors, had no reason to believe these bonds were risky investments. The agencies, whom were being paid by Wall Street, were assigning high ratings to these risky bonds.
Mortgage fraud is one of the costliest, yet seldom prosecuted crimes in the criminal world. CoreLogic estimates approximately $13 billion in fraud losses occurred in 2012, according to the latest available data in the 2012 Mortgage Fraud Trends Report (Gerding, 2013). While these numbers may seem high, the approximate $13 billion in losses is only a fraction of what it would be if every case were to be prosecuted. Mortgage fraud was also a major contributing factor towards a national, and nearly global economic collapse in 2008 when the United States economy saw the worst recession it has seen since the great depression. Anyone that has seen the films “99 homes” starring Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon or “The Big Short” starring Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling has seen a largely realistic glimpse of mortgage fraud and how devastating it can be.
In October 1981, Congress passed a tax break that allows thrifts to sell their money-losing mortgage loans and reinvest the proceeds for higher returns. Mortgages were pooled by dollar amount and interest rate and then traded. Salomon Brother’s wanted to make mortgages look like bonds. Ranieri had the loans transferred into bonds by getting a stamp of the U.S. government agency Ginnie Mae, Frannie Mae, or Freddie Mac. The stamp was proof of the U.S. government guarantee that made trading mortgage bonds possible. Ranieri’s mortgage department made 215 million over 3 years. After 6 years, Ranieri’s mortgage department was making more money than any other Salomon businesses combined. They formed this group of traders, all characterized as Italian, loud, and fat.
In the lead up to the current recession, when the real estate market began to fall, there were so many investors shorting stocks and securitized mortgage packages that were already falling, that the market simply fell further. There were no buyers at the bottom, and the professional investors made millions off of the losses of others. Beyond this, there was no real federal regulation for securitized mortgages, since there was no real way to gauge the mathematical risk of any given package. This allowed the investors to take advantage of the system and to short loans on real people’s homes. Once these securities were worthless, many of the homebuyer’s defaulted on their mortgages and were left penniless. No matter from which angle this crisis is looked at, the blame rests squarely with the managers who began the entire cycle, the ones who pursued the securitization of mortgages. Their incompetence not only led to the losses of Americans who have never invested in the stock market, but to losses for their shareholders.
All the economy’s parts seem to be working together for a change: joblessness is under 5% - a 24 year low – yet inflation is holding steady at 3%, a combination that economists thought impossible” (Pooley). This article placed the economy in very favorable position, but the economy collapsed back in 2008 when Wall Street folded. In a video published by Johnathan Jarvis titled “The Cause and Effects of the 2008 Financial Crisis,” the video explains how the economy went from being healthy and vibrant, to desperate and helpless because investors were creating mortgages with people who were not financially stable, and those mortgagors were more than likely struggling to pay their debts prior to attaining a sub-prime mortgage loan. When these sub-prime mortgages defaulted, the house was reposed by the mortgagee and put on the market to sell. When the house went up for sale because of the default, the
The Big Short is based on a real life story that is about the 2008 financial crisis which was a result of housing bubble. Sadly, unethical choices made by bankers, financial institutions and rating agencies led to a crisis that hurt the World economy badly. The main ethical business dilemma is that many people were aware of the potential risks; however, they preferred to avoid the truth, and play stupid. There are many dilemmas throughout the movie that support this finding.
The Meltdown is a PBS special on the events of the financial crisis of 2008, in a timeline format, revealing the thinking behind decisions made during the fateful months before the stock market crash in August of that year. Some financial gurus on Wall Street devised a plan to bundle several mortgages together into a group, and then selling that bundle to another group of investors looking to invest in securities. The lender did not need to earn money from the loans he was giving out, he merely gained enough of a profit from the bundling operation that billions were being made on Wall Street from 2005-2008. The problem is that these bundles were risky, and as credit unworthy individuals defaulted on their mortgages, the entire system crumbled into what is now known as the Stock Market Crash of 2008, and have subsequently lived during the Great Recession.
The Big Short is a movie that discusses the housing market crash in 2008. As you may know, the banks, the mortgage brokers, and the consumers were all affected by this collapse. On each level of the system, there were things that went wrong and that could have been changed that could have prevented the failure of the housing market.
In the early-2000s, Moody’s, one of the leading credit rating agencies in the world, evaluated thousands of bonds backed by so-called “subprime” residential mortgages—home loans made to those with both low incomes and poor credit scores. When housing prices began to fall in 2006, the value of these bonds disintegrated, and Moody’s was compelled to downgrade them significantly. In late 2008, several commercial banks, investment banks, and mortgage lenders that had been
Ryan Gosling attended the premiere of "The Big Short" on Thursday night in Los Angeles. The actor went solo outing to the big event as it happened to fall on his 35th birthday and.