At first glance the whole concept of a movie that seeks to look
at the rather complicated practices of the global financial markets that keep leading us in and out of crisis being written and directed by Terry Jones a member of Monty Python, seems somewhat insane. It is however anything but, as Jones has really mastered this subject in which he is obviously very passionate about and he manages to make this normally tedious topic both fascinating and entertaining.
Jones combines some lively interviews with academics, economists, bankers and a curious selection of interested amateurs like the actor John Cusack who is also a leading light at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with puppets acting out the parts of some of the now departed financial geniuses and soothsayers such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Hyman Minsky. Jones related how the world economy always fluctuates between boom and bust and that despite the extreme costs of when we are in a severe financial depression like the 1929 Stock Market Crash or the Credit Crisis of 2008. Arising from this, the two main strands of thought that Jones focused on is that we never ever grasp the fact that if we do not learn the lessons then these crashes will , and do occur again.
The second conclusion that Jones arrived at with the aid of his bunch of very articulate experts is that even now students are still universally taught that economic crashes just don’t happen. The one common trait that all of the bankers and politicians appear to have is denial, before and after their ill-thought out actions have brought the world onto its financial knees so to speak. Jones includes a clip of Alan Greenspan the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank giving testimony to Congress after the 2008 Crisis admitting that he had got it wrong and hadn’t seen it coming, which he then later denied so that the Markets could carry on doing business as usual.
Jones enlightens us that if we go on getting more dependent on an economy that feeds off itself by selling debts and (bad) loans and making money from people and corporations and even other banks in trouble, then it will continue to encourage a culture whose very creativity doesn’t actually contribute to the world beyond making a healthy profit for Wall Street speculators. However unlike other documentaries that tackle the instability of our economy, Jones seeks out some new ideas and fresh thinking from some of his talking heads and ensures that he leaves us feeling that there is hope, and that just maybe the next generation of economists and politicians may start to get it right.
Jones co-directed this entertaining and insightful movie with his son Bill Jones and also Ben Timlett from a script that he co-wrote Theo Kocken a Professor of Risk Management at Amsterdam University.
Labels: 2016, documentary, economy
