This is getting seven out of ten from me because it cut a good line between being informative and entertaining. It tried to be human and occasionally witty, particularly with the whitewashing of Paulson, while blasting through events at rapid speed. It needed to, because a lot was attempted and a lot happened. While the human side wasn't always perfectly effective, the sequence of events and the reasoning behind the actions is fairly clear, enough so to remind me all about what happened and how much worse things could be. Not the greatest entertainment, but effective if you come in with an interest in the material.
I wouldn't have bothered with the review at all were it not for the other reviews on here, which seem to be angry at a straightforward narrative decision to focus on Paulson and make him look like a decent human being, which is evidently unforgivable. This attitude is exactly why I've lost empathy for the average American over the last few years and gained it for people in positions of major responsibility. I'm tired of the wholesale apotheosis of the pathetic. Paulson made some genuinely good moves, and putting more decisions in the hands of the stupid multitude would have made everything worse. Hardly anyone complained about the vivisection of Glass-Steagal when it happened, which makes sense because hardly anyone really understands modern banking anyway. So I made my decision: I dropped the brain-dead populism, I stopped finding any excuse to help abdicate responsibility for the fools who bought too much house they couldn't afford, and I'm not joining any more choruses of those begging for bailouts for millions of ordinary people who couldn't keep their job or find a new one. Living helplessly doesn't garner my attention anymore. Most of the people involved in the story here went along with a broadly shared delusion of value in CDO/MBS's, then tried to pull off some damage control in a hugely complicated situation, meeting with some success while not always being smart about who to trust. The masses go along with delusions constantly, too, and they have no better record on choosing who to trust, Washington. I'm more inspired by power used competently, or even semi-competently, than inspired to throw up a middle finger because I don't feel like being a grown up anymore. Why do so many reviewers find juvenile finger-pointing worthwhile, anyway?
I wouldn't have bothered with the review at all were it not for the other reviews on here, which seem to be angry at a straightforward narrative decision to focus on Paulson and make him look like a decent human being, which is evidently unforgivable. This attitude is exactly why I've lost empathy for the average American over the last few years and gained it for people in positions of major responsibility. I'm tired of the wholesale apotheosis of the pathetic. Paulson made some genuinely good moves, and putting more decisions in the hands of the stupid multitude would have made everything worse. Hardly anyone complained about the vivisection of Glass-Steagal when it happened, which makes sense because hardly anyone really understands modern banking anyway. So I made my decision: I dropped the brain-dead populism, I stopped finding any excuse to help abdicate responsibility for the fools who bought too much house they couldn't afford, and I'm not joining any more choruses of those begging for bailouts for millions of ordinary people who couldn't keep their job or find a new one. Living helplessly doesn't garner my attention anymore. Most of the people involved in the story here went along with a broadly shared delusion of value in CDO/MBS's, then tried to pull off some damage control in a hugely complicated situation, meeting with some success while not always being smart about who to trust. The masses go along with delusions constantly, too, and they have no better record on choosing who to trust, Washington. I'm more inspired by power used competently, or even semi-competently, than inspired to throw up a middle finger because I don't feel like being a grown up anymore. Why do so many reviewers find juvenile finger-pointing worthwhile, anyway?