There was something missing from last night’s premiere of Too Big To Fail, a made for HBO movie which portrayed the inner workings of the U.S. Treasury during the financial crisis on Wall Street back in 2008. By the time the movie was over, I was still having trouble putting my finger on it. It occurred to me while the credits rolled that I had written quite a bit about the crisis while it was going on, so I headed back to the archives of Brown Man Thinking Hard to see what I’d said.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out what felt wrong about the HBO dramatization after I typed the words “Wall Street” into the box marked “search” on my original blog. The buzzwords were all there – “CDO’s”, “toxic assets”, “sliced up mortgage securities” – and the cast of heroes and villains was complete, with everybody from Richard Fuld to Warren Buffet getting mentioned, but the writers didn’t go for the jugular because they didn’t bring up the Gaussian copula formula David X. Li came up with, the formula that allowed everybody on the Street to justify putting so much of their client’s money into mortgage backed securities.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38560
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