Answer to Question #284975 in English for aly

Question

What is the movie "the big short by Michael Lewis" year 2015 implies to their viewers and how will you relate it in your future plans. (500 words)

Answer 1

The story tries to explain about drive and passion because neither of the characters was doing it just for the money. It is a character-driven piece focusing not just on the events leading up to the subprime mortgage meltdown, but also the conflicted feelings of several men who foresaw the crisis well in advance. A character like Dr. Michael Burry depicts love for his work in the financial sector to an extent of digging into the minutia because it fascinates him. His dishevelled beach bum squatting in a banker’s office look tells that he’s driven by the thrill of uncovering opportunities especially in stocks, that others have overlooked. He’s not about the power and the money. He wants to find out the unheard of and neglected opportunities. He discovered that highly-rated Mortgage-backed Securities (MBSs) are made up of bad loans, yet no one selling them seems to fully understand them because they're too busy making money to care. He even bets against them by asking banks to create Credit Default Swaps to enable him to bet against the housing market.

His actions attract the attention of banker Jared Vennett, hedge-fund specialist Mark Baum and other greedy opportunists who together make a fortune by taking full advantage of the impending economic collapse in America.

Like Burry and Vennett, Baum concludes that the housing bubble would ultimately pop, and lead to the collapse of the U.S. economy. He began shorting the financial sector.

Another category of characters is two young investors (Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley who discovered a paper written by Vennett regarding credit default swaps. They sought for investment advice from a retired banker Ben Rickert and they made a series of successful bets against mortgage-backed securities and the housing market when it finally started collapsing making a fortune on their trades.

Rickert lambasted them for profiting off the misery the mortgage meltdown caused to Middle America. The two were highly dejected regarding the moral hazard surrounding CDOs, because they discovered the investment banks and credit rating agencies conspired to conceal the risks and prop up prices of the investments. They later tried to sue the rating agencies for their misleading rankings of mortgage-backed securities and mortgages which was unsuccessful.

Generally, the movie shows the viewers that they should be passionate about what they do and have financial knowledge.

In relation to my future plans of investments, I should be on the look out to know the best times to invest in certain investments in order to get good returns.