A real engineer builds bridges. A financial engineer builds dreams. When those dreams turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it. ——《Guarding Yourself》
"Steal Yourself" attacked financial practitioners, regulators, and the economics community for being in unison, bearing inescapable responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis. The financiers are profit-seeking, induce civilians to take mortgage loans that do not match their own affordability, sacrifice the interests of customers for performance and bonuses, and get drunk with public funds to go to prostitutes. The government accepts political donations from the financial sector, the CEO of a major investment bank serves as the leader of the Ministry of Finance, and the SEC is obstructing exchanges to strengthen derivatives supervision. Economists accept compensation from financial institutions without disclosing their interests. The salaries of company executives and directors are bizarrely high.
The film's stance is radical and left, and the words are spicy. It strongly criticized the irresponsible performance of the elites in the political, financial, academic and management circles before the financial crisis, and even incited hatred of the rich to a certain extent.
In contrast to China's financial ecology, financial institutions such as the three major policy banks, the six major commercial banks, the four major insurance companies, China Investment Corporation, and Huijin, which control the country's financial lifeline, have strong political awareness. , not just "regulation". China's top brokerages and four major asset managers are also state-owned institutions. From this point of view, China is not prone to the problem of financial predators capturing the government and controlling supervision as described in the film. This may be regarded as the advantage of the Chinese system in preventing risks.
I can't help but imagine that when the market goes out of control, it is possible to establish a system that allows the government to intervene in irrational and destructive transactions, such as all transactions in a certain period of time being invalid (refer to Treasury Bond Futures "327" "In the event, the exchange canceled all transactions after 16:22:13). Maybe free market advocates will think that this kind of measure is extremely absurd. The market transaction itself is "Zhou Yu hit the yellow cover", and if you make a profit, you will definitely lose. However, this issue cannot be viewed only from an economic perspective. Considering the negative externalities such as unemployment, economic recession, and social unrest caused by the market crash, the socialist government should not sit idly by. This idea is not technically feasible at present, and it is not known whether digital currency, blockchain and other technologies can turn it into reality.
View more about Inside Job reviews