Freetrader2:

Watching the film (which hasn't come anywhere near where I live) isn't really the issue. As Dana Stevens' correctly points out, the issue is explaining a complex issue in a manner that can be watched by a mass audience. That is difficult enough, since any book about any financial issue (from Barbarian's at the Gates to the Smartest Guys in the Room) invariably are already simplifications, movies about them usually just go for comic effect -- the real issues are simply too complex to explain. Dana Stevens, and the maker of the film, are pretty certain where the blame should lie, and it is that point I am commenting on.

So, please don't condenscend to someone who probably knows a helluva lot more about this topic than you do. Next time, make a worthwhile comment, please.

You have no idea what I know about this subject, and appealing to your own expertise does not lend validity to anything you say.

A major theme in the film (of which i have seen several large exerpts) is the very notion of complexity you mention. Complexity was used as a screen to confuse people, and in the case of these mortgages the confusion allowed and encouraged loan officers to sign people on to loans that the banks' experts knew would fail. Complexity was also used as a screen to protect the very same people and institutions that perpetrated these frauds from any of the consequences. The foreclosed home buyers themselves, the rest of the world economy that has suffered as a result, and the citizens who have been unwillinglingly drafted into mortgaging their children's future to save bankers' jobs and bonuses had no such protection. Once we understand this, we can see through all the bullshit about "financial instruments" and figure out with certainty where the blame lies.