Inside Job (2010)

Inside Job is a 2010 American documentary film, directed by Charles Ferguson, about the late-2000s financial crisis. Ferguson, who began researching in 2008, says the film is about “the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption”, amongst them conflicts of interest of academic research which led to improved disclosure standards by the American Economic Association. In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis.

It begins by examining how Iceland was highly deregulated in 2000 and the privatization of its banks. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and AIG collapsed, Iceland and the rest of the world went into a global recession. At the Federal Reserve annual Jackson Hole conference in 2005, Raghuram Rajan, then the chief economist of IMF, warned about the growing risks in the financial system and proposed policies that would reduce such risks. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called the warnings “misguided” and Rajan himself a “luddite”. However, following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Rajan’s views were seen as prescient and he was extensively interviewed for this movie.