'American Casino' – A New Documentary On The Subprime Crisis

"American Casino" puts the blame on capitalists.

That's funny. Most of the capitalist intellectuals I read on the housing crisis, such as Thomas Sowell, put the blame on government interference with the free market.

It seems that most of us see things through highly distorted glasses.

The objective person is a rare person.

Those who hate capitalism are re-affirmed in their beliefs by this crisis and those who hate government intervention are equally affirmed in their beliefs.

And the American people generally? Well, they voted Left. They voted for the most left-wing president in U.S. history.

The Washington Post reports:

A systematic explanation of why, as an opening title notes, "the U.S. government has pledged over $12 trillion . . . to bail out Wall Street" — and an empathetic attempt to connect numbers on a computer screen to the lives being forever changed by foreclosure — "American Casino" is at its strongest when it draws a straight line from, say, Denzel Mitchell, a friendly, bankrupt Baltimore high school teacher, all the way to Goldman Sachs, the company that gambled on bonds based on his subprime mortgage. Through carefully selected interviews, the Cockburns clearly establish the effects of "agents along the value chain" who got rich by packaging and repackaging high-risk loans until there's no real link between the borrower and the money. Until it all collapses. As one reporter, pointing out the astonishingly high default rates in the packaged loans Goldman bought, wryly notes, "No one told Denzel that he's a chip."

Anyone who already understands the current economic disaster will find little new in "American Casino." But for the rest of us, this "Frontline"-esque documentary is at turns eye-opening (a former mortgage broker smilingly admits that he, and everyone he worked with, regularly altered unqualified and unwitting borrowers' financials in order to secure loans) and enraging (hedge investor Jeff Greene explains, from the deck of his Malibu home, how he has earned $500 million betting on the default of high-risk bonds).