Margin Call (The movie) - How did you find it ?

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*Watch out, slight spoiler*
I saw it last week-end. I thought it was very entertaining.
What I found good:
- none of that young idealist trader who goes rogue against the evil establishment and saves the world crap. None of the good ends up prevailing in people crap. Shows a rather dark side of things. Kind of refreshing after Shia LaBeouf.
- characters: the Jeremy Irons character was just epic. The Simon Baker character was hilarious.
What I found was less good:
- the technical aspect of it was very limited. I know it can’t go too deep in financial details otherwise it won’t interest most viewers, but still.
- the trigger of the plot. It’s all about an analyst discovering that the models to value MBS are using false historical volatility assumptions and that said MBS were basically worthless in a high volatility environment. I mean the whole movie revolves around the discovery of something obvious.
Anyways all in all I much enjoyed it.
What did you guys think ?
P.s. Sorry if that movie is already necro in the USA, but it just came out at the movies where I live.
 
Haven’t seen it yet; it only opened here in the States on the weekend too.
But I’m planning to see it; the reviews look pretty strong.
At the risk of derailing this thread, have you noticed the surprising number of movies that have been made about the 2007–2010 financial crisis?
* Wall Street 2
* Inside Job
* Capitalism: A Love Story
* Too Big to Fail
* Margin Call
 
i thought it was one of the better movies about the industry that i’ve seen. they did a good job actually writing dialogue that makes sense (from a finance standpoint) and making the characters believable. they pretty much nail they way an IB operates, approach to risk, hierarchy/politics.
that said i have a few complaints: (contains spoilers)
- it feels like a play rather than a movie. it moves very slowly. there is almost no music and the whole thing basically takes place in one location and involves a few people talking to each other – no action.
- the plot is very very basic and there isn’t much of set-up, climax, and conclusion. they identify this risk issue, do a bunch of talking about it up the ranks, decide to hold a fire sale, do the fire sale, everyone’s life is ruined, the end. kind of left something to be desired in terms of doing more to develop the characters, create conflict, and then resolve it. you didn’t really get a chance to get to know any of the characters – mainly b/c there are a bunch of actors and no main character.
- maybe just an issue for me b/c i actually work in the industry but they did fall into some dumb stereotypes in their depictions of some of the characters. that speech kevin spacey gives after the initial round of layoffs is ridiculous and would never happen that way in reality (i.e. calling the laid off guys losers, etc.). their constant talking about money isn’t indicative of reality either. i feel like these are things people outside of WS think people that work on WS do, but that don’t really hold true.
 
I thought it was really well-made and entertaining. I forgive most of the complaints listed above because they managed to make it somewhat realistic and still enjoyable and understandable to the lay audience. One thing I liked about it a lot was its lack of condescension, i.e., no scene in which Treasury Department staffers are sitting around describing how MBS work to each other in early September 2008.
My only gripe, which I suppose is small in the scheme of things, is that the central conflict of the movie was, whether a bank should sell securities that it thinks are going down in value? In other words, should the bank absorb the losses itself rather than dump them on other banks?
My problem with this conflict is that to my knowledge no banker, trader, broker, or underwriter has ever asked himself this question, anywhere, ever. The whole reason to sell something is that you think it’s going to lose value, and to my knowledge nobody has ever even proposed that bankers SHOULD ask themselves this question before they sell something. I found that tension completely contrived.
Maybe a way to make it more realistic would have been if the bank decided to liquidate everything by misrepresenting the securities or omitting material information, which was more in-line with what Goldman was accused of in the Abacus transaction and sort of the more overarching criticism of Wall Street in 2007-08.
But anyway, outside of that one point I enjoyed it, probably give it an A-.
 
…I think it was less an issue of selling a security they thought would go down in price and more an issue of deciding to no longer support a market as a dealer with the understanding of what implications that would have for markets/sentiment as a whole. m2c.
 
Interesting points guys.
Wasn’t the “discovery” based on some fundamental research from the rocket science dude ? If I recall correctly it’s not as if the whole bank was considering trading on insider info.
Now, the said mortgage securities were used for securitisation, for sure some sort of CDO. As a dealer in a primary market, you cannot sell something while misrepresenting the value of it. But in the case in point, they were just contemplating selling the securities in the secondary market, where they were just trading like everybody else.
A comparable case is if you are a fund manager and have purchased some stocks to put in a mutual fund. Then through fundamental research you discover that these stocks are crap. It is your duty not to sell them to your investors. But nothing stops you from selling the said crap stocks back on the market.
Thoughts ?
 
I think the dilemma Kevin Spacey was in here was that he knew dumping these securities onto other banks would 1) ruin the market 2) destroy the other banks 3) ruin their own reputation in the market. From the firm’s point of view, they obviously would want to (and did) get rid of all of this stuff. I don’t see what alternative Kevin Spacey had in mind - did he just want to hold onto it and go down with it? Sort of like a sacrifice to limit the damage to just his firm rather than push it into the market and cause a contagion.
 
Not sure why it was called “Margin Call” though …? Could’ve used a more approrpiate name I feel.
 
Watched it last night, found it really entertaining. The lack of hollywood bullcrap made it a lot more real feeling. Of course anytime it got into something complex “look on slide 43 at the volatility bla bla…” then the other character says “hey man that crap means nothing to me, say in plain english!” so the audience can get the dumbed down version.
 
Just noticed that Margin Call is out on DVD and available at my local Redbox. Whee !
 
It was decently entertaining. It was certainly much better than Wall Street 2. What was the deal with Keven Spacey’s dog? Was that part to show that he had some semblance of a humane conscience?
 
I thought it was a great movie while appealing to as broad an audience as possible.
The dog was meant to initially make it look like Kevin Spacey was a jackass that cared more about his dog than anybody at the firm… but was revealed that he really has nothing in his life except his career and his dog… in which in two days, he lost both.
 
i wasn’t disappointed or impressed……its an average movie at best to me…..
 
I thought thems made good points about the plot. In that sense, it isn’t better than Wall Street. He’s right about feeling like a play, but I don’t really care one way or the other. Glengarry Glen Ross feels like play (was a play), but was still good.
However, I thought the constant asking about how much money other people made was hilarious. Maybe it wasn’t realistic (you really don’t wonder how much your boss makes?), but I imagine that people outside the industry think people in it are doing it.
 
thought it was some impressive acting but left much to be desired as far as the plot was concerned.
 
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