MovieChat Forums > Margin Call (2011) Discussion > Problems- From a Finance Student

Problems- From a Finance Student

posted 13 years ago by t_may15
99 replies | jump to latest

So when I originally heard about this movie I was excited as I heard that IT WAS NOT POLITICAL. I was excited to see a movie on this subject that didn't have an agenda, that actually knew what it was talking about.

Now for the most part I enjoyed this movie. I thought it was superbly acted. The casting was great. The cinematography was wonderful.

The one big GLARING flaw. The one(there's a few other less obvious ones) thing that made me have to take this movie so much less seriously was this - They really wanted to show that the guys AT THE TOP were incompetent when it came to the actual business of trading. I don't want to watch through the movie and pick out the lines verbatim but there are at least 3, probably more, scenes where Will, Sam , and John either outright say that they don't understand or suggest it by saying something like " just speak plainly" or something to that effect. This is just so laughably ridiculous. The HEADS of a trading floor are going to understand the business, and probably better than anyone else..... It's no different than any other industry. Does the HEAD engineer understand engineering ? Does the head accountant understand accounting? Do the partners at a law firm know how to practice law?

In the finance business there is a designation called the CFA ( chartered financial analyst ). This is a brutally hard designation to achieve that require 4 years of graduate study. Failure rates exceed 40%. People in Will or Sam's position would most likely have this designation. And they certainly aren't going to have trouble understanding the models or reading the charts.......This one point to me gave away the writers slant and made them look like utter fools in this regard.

That is all.

[–] huber_tylor 13 years ago

i wondered about this too, but i saw it as a simple plot device for the audience. If they didn't talk plainly not many people would be able to understand what was actually happening in the Movie.

[–] ThatGuamGuy 13 years ago

"This one point to me gave away the writers slant and made them look like utter fools in this regard."

Why would you chalk this up as a political thing? If the writers wanted to show a political slant that was anti-big business (as you seem to imply), wouldn't they say that the big bosses like Jeremy Irons *did* understand the risk and knowingly participated in it?

I'm not saying you're wrong that the characters would or wouldn't have known, but the writers did that to make the things that they're talking about make sense to audience members. This is a thing that was so complicated that (in real life) even most of the smartest guys in the room apparently didn't see it coming until it was biting them in the ass, so it's probably a bit difficult to explain correctly in less than two hours. I think "Explain it to me in plain English" is the way to go, and if it bothers you that they all should've understood immediately, chalk it up to "it was the middle of the night, everybody was tired."

[–] mojorising_you 13 years ago

I think CEOs ask lower level people to explain it as if they know nothing so the CEO is getting the information direct from the source unfiltered. It isn't that he's dumb, though there are a lot of dumb CEOs out there, its just that they get info through the levels, retold many times and it may not resemble what it started out as. Remember the Telephone Game?

[–] sellis1 13 years ago

I've just read this entire thread and I have a new idea that no one else has thought of: those characters might be saying "just speak plainly" or something like that so that the audience can understand the issues!

[–] Trackmaster 13 years ago

It would be a flaw to assume that a CEO and the higher-ups at Fortune 500 companies are merely salesman who take clients out of lunch and cocktails in the 21st century, with Sarbanes Oxley and a very competitive environment. But I think that it's not so much a flaw because many who attain those positions are also very humble, and try to deflect glory from themselves.

Plus, any executive knows that the most direct form of communication is one that is acceptable for a layman, so there is no confusion. Napolean instructed all correspondance from generals to be written so that a private could understand it.

[–] Jakezen 12 years ago

"I think that it's not so much a flaw because many who attain those positions are also very humble, and try to deflect glory from themselves"

They get those high positions because they are not humble but aggressive and competitive. Which is not to say that is a bad thing.

[–] lbrad2001 13 years ago

Gonna have to disagree. The various financial positions of a company like this are so vast that no one person could possibly understand all of it. That's like saying The President of The United States has full understanding of all military and intelligence matters. That being said I'm sure the meetings shown in the movie would have been more technical in nature in reality. However would simply throwing in more "market-speak" imply that the people in charge have a better understanding of the market, or simply a bigger vocabulary? It also would have made the movie considerably more boring which is why most of the lingo is cut out.

[–] Trackmaster 13 years ago

Good point Ibrad2001. If they would have had them talk in jargon, they probably would have had to put subtitles in. LOL

[–] Jelly-4 13 years ago

Yeah I thought those scenes were more for the viewer. Jeremy IRons asking the analyst to put things in plain English is so that the audience knows what's happening and put some context before the trading scenes play out. The avg. viewer isn't going to understand all the financial jargon so they had to put it as plainly as possible and repeat it several times.

I didn't think for a minute that in real life someone in Jeremy Irons' position wouldn't know what's going on.

Are the boardroom scenes realistic? No. Do they make for better movie making? Yes.

[–] lancedulak 13 years ago

You have a huge shock coming. I'm also shocked (not really.. you are a business/finance major... you guys arent known for brains or creativity in general) that you dont realise very very few people in the financial sector even understand all of their quadrant of the economy. It's rather shocking that you dont realise this is something like what just happened in the US.

In the US crash 99% of wall street had no clue that there was danger in what was happening. The low level bankers pushing loans out the door as fast as possible didnt really know.. all they knew was they could resell loans as fast as they could make them. The bankers knew they owned the ratings companies and could include high risk and low risk loans and resell them to mega-investors .. as low risk loans. Because they owned the ratings companies. The ratings companies employees knew they were under no risk because their bosses told them to rate the loans A. The investors "knew" the industry was regulated therefore loans they bought as A loans were good investments. Noone saw how this could cause a collapse. Even the thieves at the top thought it would just cause a little pain to the megainvestors. A FEW people on wall street got it.. sortof reversed the process betting on the loans collapsing... and got insanely rich. Heres the thing. There were a handfull of thieves at the very very top who set it in motion. There were a handfull of midlevel rating experts who got that corruption was going on. Noone but those few who bet against the scheme had any clue as to the whole system.. or what was going to happen.

Or more simply... there are maybe 50 people in this country who can accurately explain derivatives. There are probably ten times that who know it is going on to this day.. exactly as it was before. The fact that an econ student doesnt understand.. any of this.. should tell you that the upper level suits dont either.

[–] detroit-velvet-smooth 13 years ago

I think people are being a bit dim here. The best explanation for why he wanted them to speak in as plain terms as possible was becuase he knew that as long as you understood the system and the language that you know how to play with it and change it around. They are salesmen and they and hucking a product. When asses are on the line, and something this huge happens it makes perfect sense for the big guy to say "spare me the BS, and just get to the point because I already understand it in theory but don't know the actual implications of what has happened and I don't want you equivocating and using verbal sleight of hand to ass cover."

Basically, I see it as the big boy doesn't want to be handled. Remember when they went in one of them warned "Just tell the truth, nobody here is smart enough to lie, even the rocket scientist." I see this as corroborating the above sentiment. He may sound and speak simply and act like you have to dumb it down, but really maybe he's just handling them.

When he starts rifling off recession and crash years it seems to me that he's pretty well educated on the market and its history and a guy like that doesn't seem like the type to not know whats happening today but be well versed enough to recite off every crash since the formation of the republic.

Just a thought.

[–] iammrssmith 13 years ago

It was "dumbed down" so we , the audience could understand

[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Korios 12 years ago

This was indeed a huge plot fault yet it was clearly a deliberate plot fault, a "plot device" as they call them. It is quite simple : you cannot make a film out of charts or numbers on a computers screen or sheets of printed text. You have to use dialog. And you have to use an average Joe dialog, one that can be understood by everyone but really dumb ones. So they made the top heads economics illiterate so that we could make sense of what was taking place via the dialog. However a deliberate plot fault is still a plot fault, so your points are valid.

signature start:
The term "suspension of disbelief" was coined by LOLW, the League of Lazy Writers.