What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense. ...
No, the only real beneficiaries of Pain Caucus policies (aside from the Chinese government) are the rentiers: bankers and wealthy individuals with lots of bonds in their portfolios.
And that explains why creditor interests bulk so large in policy; not only is this the class that makes big campaign contributions, it’s the class that has personal access to policy makers — many of whom go to work for these people when they exit government through the revolving door. The process of influence doesn’t have to involve raw corruption (although that happens, too). All it requires is the tendency to assume that what’s good for the people you hang out with, the people who seem so impressive in meetings — hey, they’re rich, they’re smart, and they have great tailors — must be good for the economy as a whole.
The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?
Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness. ...
The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.
Note that the italicized portion leaves interest groups out of it; that column was attacking elite ideology rather than interest groups. I like the more recent Krugman better, for reasons I've already described. What was missing from the older Krugman was just this sort of interest group political story. Leaving them out of the story in the way older Krugman did before is thus missing a huge element. Interest groups come in all shapes and sizes, but right now the policy space does appear to be fairly strongly skewed in favor of creditors rather than debtors. There is a way to link the two Krugmans -- interest groups influence the elite via lobbying and contributions -- but in that case elites are merely an intervening variable, rather than the primary causal variable. The more recent Krugman is honing in on the fundamental cause.
I think the more recent Krugman probably overstates the case a bit, but it's an op-ed not a long-form essay so that's understandable. Anyway, I'm happy influential folks are starting to think and write in these terms. It's not too often that this kind of overt political economy is on the NYTimes op-ed page.
An unprecedented alliance of organizations from the real estate industry, new home builders, mortgage companies, banks, civil rights groups and other lobbyists have descended on Washington, D.C. lawmakers to push against legislation that would require 20% down payments for a mortgage.
The Qualified Residential Mortgage “QRM” proposal would limit the number of home buyers qualified to make a purchase, require higher credit scores and send mortgage underwriting back more than 30 years. Members of Congress are struggling to reach a balance to provide new regulations for home mortgages, implement financial reform legislation and provide realistic reforms on home mortgages. ...
“The Qualified Residential Mortgage (QRM) will define who will and who will not get the most affordable mortgage products, potentially prohibiting a significant segment of qualified borrowers from being able to achieve homeownership,” said Mortgage Bankers CEO David H. Stevens. “Allowing more time for comment will enable us to prepare a more thoughtful and comprehensive analysis and response.” ...
Groups from both major political parties wrote to the six federal agencies last week implementing mortgage changes, which are the SEC, FDIC, HUD, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal housing Finance Agency and the Federal Reserve to urge them to focus of “sound underwriting, safe loans,” mortgage borrowers’ ability to repay loans and fully documented loans, and not to require larger down payments as they work on regulations to improve the mortgage finance system.
When major elements of both political parties line up with citizens' groups, finance, and a major industry (construction) on the same side of a policy, is it any wonder that policy gets pushed in that direction? This was what I was driving at in my previous posts on housing politics and the blame game.
Via Arnold Kling, who says that part of this is wrong: this is anything but "unprecedented"; it's been the same political dynamic for the past 20 years (some of which Kling observed directly, working at the Fed and Freddie Mac).
Daniel Davies and Alex Tabarrok objected to the graphs of GDP I included in this post on The Great Stagnation. Specifically, they didn't like the fact that the hypothetical lines I drew reflect constant linear growth rather than constant percentage growth. I.e., I didn't compound the growth when i drew those lines. They're right that the latter is a better measure of trend (it's what is used in almost all statistical analyses), so here's a new graph that takes that into consideration.
This graph shows the actual GDP per capita growth (circles) for the US, OECD, and entire world. The lines that begin in 1974 reflect what GDP per capita would look like if it had continued to grow at the 1960-1973 rate*. Note that a "Great Stagnation" hypothesis would expect significantly weaker growth post-1973, not the same amount and certainly not more. So the fact that the US was above the trend line until the early 2000s provides fairly strong evidence that if we're in a Great Stagnation it's more recent than Cowen argues, and doesn't correlate with stagnating median incomes all that well. In fact, the US does better than either the OECD or the globe, if "better" is defined as "closest to 1960-1973 trend", although the OECD trend line is quite a bit steeper**.
Anyway, just wanted to make sure I didn't leave the impression that my main point (about distribution) relies on faulty extrapolation.
*Specifically, I regressed a year counter on the log of GDP per capita (constant dollars, via WDI) from 1960-1973. The coefficient estimate represents the average growth in GDP per capita per year during that period. I then took that coefficient estimate and added it to 1973's GDP per capita to get 1974's predicted point, added the same constant to the predicted 1974 to get the predicted 1975, and so on.
**Of course the US is a big part of both OECD and world economies; if you removed the US from those groups the US would likely look still better in comparison. Although in the OECD's case, they added some countries during the series (e.g. Mexico, Slovakia) with lower per capita GDP than more established industrialized countries.
"The trade war between China and Europe will not break out over manufacturing industry, customs duties, dumping or the yuan exchange rate, but on a front that no one expected: in the sky," writes La Stampa, in the wake of a threat voiced by the Beijing representative at the IATA (International Air Transport Association) Conference to simply close Chinese air space "if the EU, as it has already decided, introduces an emissions tax on all intercontinental flights leaving the EU on 1st January." The European Commission plans to grant a "license to pollute" similar to those already esablished for other industrial sectors to every airline operating in Europe, explains Le Monde: 82% of emissions rights will be free, but a 18% will have to be purchased on "carbon credits market."
My understanding is that so long as the EU rules are applied non-discriminatorily, such an emissions tax is WTO-legal.
There's been some good discussion of this report by Robert Kuttner, explaining the political battle between creditors and debtors. Kuttner starts off:
Economic history is filled with bouts of financial euphoria followed by painful mornings after. When nations awake saddled with debts incurred to finance wars, episodes of failed speculation, or grand projects that haven’t paid off, they have two choices. Either the creditor class prevails at the expense of everyone else, or governments find ways to reduce the debt burden so that the productive power of the economy can recover.
Creditors—the rentier class in classic usage—are usually the wealthy and the powerful. Debtors, almost by definition, have scant resources or power. The “money issue” of 19th century America, about whether credit would be cheap or dear, was also a battle between growth and austerity.
And concludes:
These issues are treated as either impossibly technical or as non-debatable. They are neither. We need to democratize the money issue once again.
I like this framing because it moves us past lax psychological explanations ("pain caucus"), willful ignorance ("economists have unlearned what Say and Mill knew"), and hard-money/anti-debtor moralizing. It gets us to what's really important, which is the political dynamic of creditor-debtor relations, and the fact that different groups have different preferences over policies which are motivated by their interests. In other words, we're talking about political economy, which I obviously think is a step in the right direction. As I argued in my anti-econ rant from a few weeks back, talking about optimal policy makes little sense when you start from the assumption that there is not optimal policy; that policy is about distribution.
And there's a lot of research in IPE and CPE linking governments controlled by left parties to higher inflation, indicating that interest-based explanations work pretty well*. See, eg, this classic 1977 study by Hibbs, and this article by Franzese on how central bank independence is a myth. There's a lot of stuff since then too (see cites on the first page of this article on trade by Milner and Judkins).
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all cynical; my experience is that there are relatively few people who consciously keep a secret set of intellectual books, who preach Neanderthal goldbuggism because it’s in their interests while rereading Keynes by dead of night to figure out what’s really happening. Instead, people generally manage to believe whatever is in their interests. ...
Still, thinking of what’s happening as the rule of rentiers, who are getting their interests served at the expense of the real economy, helps make sense of the situation.
In a follow-up, he took a rough cut at figuring out who belongs in which group. Yglesias notes that older people, who are out of the labor market, have fewer debts, and have more financial assets that could lose value via inflation, are another interested group. And, of course, older Americans tend to vote more often than younger votes.
Steve Randy Waldman picked up on the financial political economy angle:
Banks, after all, are not only creditors. They are also the economy’s biggest debtors. In theory, bank loyalties ought to be mixed. On the one hand, banks prefer deflationary, zero-forgiveness tight-money policies, to maximize the real value of their assets and of the lending spread from which they draw profits and bonuses. On the other hand, troubled banks are very happy to support loose money and expansionary policy, even at risk of inflation. For bank managers and shareholders, it is bad to have the value of past loans eroded by inflation. But it is much worse to lose their franchises entirely, to have their wealth, prestige, and freedom put at risk in the aftermath of an explicit bank failure. When banks are in trouble, they are perfectly happy to support all manner of expansionary policy, as long as short-term interest rates are kept low. Even a broad-based inflation helps troubled banks twice over, by increasing borrowers incomes and by steepening the yield curve. Increased incomes ensure that loans will be repaid in nominal terms, preventing insolvency due to credit losses. A steep yield curve permits banks to recapitalize themselves via maturity transformation, using deposits to purchase Treasury notes while the central bank promises to hold short rates low for a few years.
But banks’ interests are aligned with those of debtors only to the degree that banks, like debtors, are at risk of real insolvency. When we committed to a policy of “no more Lehmans”, when we made clear via TARP and TGLP and the Fed’s alphabet soup that big banks would have funding on demand and on easy terms, when we modified accounting standards to eliminate the risk that bad loans on the books would translate to failures, when we funded their recapitalization on the sly, we changed banks. We transformed them from nervous debtors into pure rentiers, who see a lot more upside in squeezing borrowers than in eliminating a crippling debt overhang. And since banks are, shall we say, not entirely disenfranchised among policymakers, we increased the difficulty of making policy that includes accommodations between creditors and debtors, accommodations that permit the economy to move forward rather than stare back over its shoulder, nervously and greedily, at a gigantic pile of old debt.
This dynamic is part of what drives the results I found in this paper, discussed here and here, except I added in politics of central banking and regulation as well. One implication is that regulatory central banks essentially have no choice but to provide easy money to banks during downturns. Banks know they'll have access to these funds when needed, so they act more riskily during booms. It's monetary moral hazard**. In other words, I believe this same rentier/debtor politics can make financial crises more likely.
There is another element to this. Increased inflation in the US will narrow the real exchange rate adjustment that is boosting American competitiveness relative to exporting countries like China. To the extent that we want to boost employment through exporting, increased inflation could prolong that process. And if the problem is not just immediate unemployment, but medium-run global rebalancing, then it might not be as simple as "poor want inflation, rich want deflation".
This political cleavage is what the current austerity/stimulus battles are about, in both Europe and the US. I previously surveyed some of the IPE literature on this question, discussing its findings in relation to the eurozone, here.
*Sometimes these are phrased in terms of resolving the Phillips curve tradeoff in one direction or the other. More recent econ work has questioned the validity of the Phillips curve, but that doesn't necessarily imply that the perceived politics changes. This isn't my area of substantive expertise, and I understand that there's a bit of controversy in the comparative literature, but I believe the implications for monetary politics hold up pretty well.
**Note that we haven't seen the ECB behave this way, at least not on the level of the Fed, which is why the political battles in Europe are over fiscal transfers.
See Daniel Davies' comments on my original post, plus this from Whelan at IIEA and this from Storbeck. Via Felix Salmon, who also had this to say.
The upshot is that this appears not to be the stealth bailout that I thought it was, although I have to admit that at this point I'm confused on a few points and will need a bit of time to sort through it all. Also, even if this isn't a stealth bailout I think that's probably a shame. The monetary authorities can do much more to help the Europeriphery, while the fiscal authorities are out of political bullets. So I'd rather have some clandestine bailouts than not.
I've written about this in terms of lender of last resort, but Edward Hugh says the Fed's importance goes well beyond that:
If the global economy has been growing reasonably well over the last six months it is because what Nouriel Roubini once called a “wall of liquidity” is seeping out of the United States, where solvent domestic demand for credit is flat and will remain flat due to the private indebtedness problem (remember US “over consumption” (the high proportion of GDP which has been consumption driven) has only been the mirror image of Chinese “over investment” and we that live in a world which badly needs to rebalance).
This “wall of liquidity” has been force feeding strong growth in a number of key emerging markets, and this growth has been generating strong demand for exports from a number of developed economies, and most particularly from Germany. Thus the German boom is no mystery, and has been intimately tied to the implementation of QE2 in the US. Note, in the chart below, how the German manufacturing PMI was slowing in the summer of 2010, how it surged in the autumn (QE2) and how it is now swooning again. There is no mystery to these “soft spots”, all you need to ask yourself is where the demand is coming from. ...
Maybe it seems peculiar to be arguing that policy in the Federal Reserve should be partially conditioned by policy failures in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece, but such is the nature of the inter-connected world we live in.
Francis Fukuyama has what looks like a Big, Important book out by that title, but I haven't seen much discussion. He was on Colbert, and Cowen got to it, but little from political scientists. Too soon?
Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation has gotten a lot of attention for both its form and content. (I.e., there's more than a little irony in the fact that a book alleging that technological progress has markedly slowed was the first notable electronic-only book, although it has since been released in pulp-and-glue as well.) In the video above he presents his main thesis at TEDxEast. For those unaware, the argument runs basically like this: since 1973 or thereabouts, there has been a slowdown in median American income growth, and that trend has increased in the past decade. That slowdown is mostly attributable to a decline in technological innovation. We've reaped the gains of past innovations -- cars, planes, electricity, plumbing -- but haven't made many new ones. We tweak the old innovations to our advantage -- we've made cars safer and added GPS -- but those are marginal improvements, not fundamental advances. The exception is the internet and communications more generally, but while those improve quality of life they do little to improve typical incomes.
Cowen's argument has bothered me on a number of levels. First, I think he understates the real, and monetary, value of the internet and improved communications technology for standards of living. Second, I think he makes a mistake by looking almost entirely at the U.S., and almost entirely at median income. I want to focus on the second of these, placing it in the context of the first.
I'm really late to this party... Cowen's book has been covered by everyone in the blogosphere and almost everyone in the corporate press, so I'm sure someone has written more or less exactly what I'm about to write, but I've haven't seen it in quite this form before. So to see why I think Cowen's thesis is wrong, or at least incomplete, let's start with some global data.
This graph shows global real gdp per capita from 1960-2009 (blue line). I've highlighted 1973's income level -- $1,148 -- to show what the world looked like around the time that Cowen thinks the Great Stagnation started in the US. In the following 35 years, per-person income increased by nearly 800%. If the pre-1973 trend had continued (red line), that number would be more than halved. If growth post-1973 had stagnated, we'd be below the red line. But that didn't happen, as we can see from this series. First, global growth in the 1970s was faster than in the 1960s. And while that trend wasn't consistent through the 1980s and 1990s (dark green line), global GDP growth in the 2000s was the fastest during the period. In fact, by the end of the decade we'd caught back up to where we'd be if the 1970s trend had been consistent, before the financial crisis knocked us back a bit. But the story here is of pretty rapid growth on a global scale that actually accelerated in the most recent decade. No Great Stagnation, on a global level at least.
Cowen agrees that global growth has been strong as other countries adopt the innovations the U.S. has already exploited. This "catch-up" growth may be fine for developing countries, which have a lot of low-hanging fruit, but he wants to focus on those at the edge of the technology frontier, especially the US. So let's look at what's happened to US growth over the same period.
The green line represents approximately where US incomes would be if we had stayed at the pre-1973 rate of growth. Average incomes would be less than half what they are now. If the economy had stagnated, as Cowen claims, average incomes would be below the green line. Instead, the rate of US growth actually increased over that period, at a more rapid pace even than the increase in global growth depicted in the first graph. This doesn't look like stagnation at all, much less a Great Stagnation. So what is Cowen going on about?
Ah, the picture looks a bit different if you compare mean GDP/capita to median GDP/capita. Before 1973 the two tracked each other very closely. Post-1973, mean GDP/capita (the white circles) kept growing at roughly the pre-1973 trend rate, while median GDP/capita (black diamonds) stagnated. But the economy overall did not. Just median incomes. That indicates, to me, that Cowen's preferred causal mechanism -- a stagnation due to slowdown in innovation -- is missing what's actually happened. There's been enough growth, it just hasn't gone to the median earner. The result has been higher inequality.
Why has that happened? Theories abound. Some political scientists have recently made the case that rising inequality is a result of wealthy groups hijacking politics for their own economic benefit. In other words, the distribution of growth is zero-sum, and it's been redistributed towards the wealthy in the form of tax cuts, decline in union membership, erosion of the welfare state, and deregulation. I think there's something to that, but I think it's too focused on developments specific to the US. To get the whole picture, I think we need to situate the US in a global context.
It's difficult to find reliable estimates of global median income in a time series (in fact I couldn't... pointers welcome), but indications are that inequality is increasing within many countries, and across them as well. This is also not consistent with Cowen's argument, since the movement towards the technology frontier in the US was associated with rising median income, not rising inequality. If that's the process that rapidly-growing economies like China and India are in, then we should see less inequality, not more. And if the Great Stagnation is something that afflict the US specifically, we might expect the gap between the US and the rest of the world to narrow, not widen.
So I think a more nuanced theory is needed. Specifically, we need to be able to explain two things: stagnating median, but not mean, incomes; global, not just local, trends. So what do we know about the major ways in which the global economy has changed over the past 40 years? I think three things are most relevant:
1. The global economy has become more integrated. This is partially due to politics, as more countries opened their economies to trade and investment. Average tariff rates have fallen dramatically during the GATT/WTO tenure. Capital accounts have been opened by many countries. Additionally, technological improvements have lowered transaction costs. International trade and investment have increased dramatically as a result. The consequence of this movement is a larger (global) market with more middle- and high-income consumers, and increased competition in production. This leads to point #2.
2. The US's post-WWII advantage was conducive to broad-based growth. The US share of global manufacturing was nearly 50% immediately after the war. The other industrialized economies were mostly decimated by the war, and many countries had not yet industrialized. For an American worker during this period, a high marginal product (relative to a foreign worker) did not require large amounts of human capital. Relatively low-skilled workers could mix with (non-human) capital in fairly lucrative ways. In a sense, the median American worker was able to collect rents from the rest of the world from 1945-1973, because the de-industrialization in Europe and pre-industrialization in much of the rest of the world operated as barriers to competition. By the early 1970s those advantages had waned, and trade agreements made it difficult for the US to protect domestic workers. The increased competition from workers in Europe and the Asian NICs (which shifted to export-biased development in the 1960s-70s) led to the US's share of global manufacturing output to fall to 20-25% by 1973, where it has stayed more or less ever since. This hit high-wage/less-skilled workers in tradable industries the hardest, since those were the workers that would face international competition directly. It isn't surprising that incomes would stagnate as those "rents", born of circumstance, are competed away.
3. These same processes benefit high-skilled workers with lots of human capital, as did the technological improvements, particularly in information technology and communications. The rise of the rest has increased the market into which they can sell their labor (demand curve shifts right), but the high skills required to compete with them provide a continuing barrier to entry (supply curve sticks). Compensation for those high-skill workers (and innovators) goes up, but is stuck for everyone else. We get a weak version of "superstar economics", where the highly-skilled are able exploit lower transaction costs to sell into an ever-enlarging global market, while the lower-skilled face increased competition. It's a two-track economy.
Cowen dismisses globalization-rooted theories of the Great Stagnation (around minute 12 in the video above), but (to my knowledge) he hasn't dealt with the sort of mechanisms I'm discussing in any kind of detail. Somewhat bizarrely, Cowen also claims that modern innovations (the internet, satellite-based telephones) have not contributed to GDP very much. But then how to explain how GDP growth, and total worker productivity, have increased post-1973 at the same rate as pre-1973? Median incomes have stagnated because those innovations, unlike previous innovations in manufacturing, do not require the mobilization of huge numbers of workers to increase output. A few computer programmers or financiers can create generate output on their own.
There's another aspect to this that I think Cowen has missed. Increased inequality and a move to a superstarish economy should create more of an incentive for innovation, not less. And while Cowen complains that scientists are no longer heralded by society as they once were, innovators most definitely are. We make movies about them and their social networks, and then give awards to the movies. We make them the richest people in the world. And, contra Cowen, we have seen a lot of innovation in the past 35 years. Cowen focuses on innovations in two major areas that led to the pre-Stagnation growth: transportation and energy. He may be correct that innovation in transportation has declined, although the rise in high-speed rail (outside the US) might be one counterpoint), but part of that is because innovations in communication and information technology has made transportation less necessary. In terms of energy, there have been more breakthroughs in new energy sources from 1980-now than there was from 1945-1973.
There's more I could discuss, but this is long enough. So in short: I do not see a world economy that has stagnated overall. I don't even see a US economy (pre-2008) that has stagnated. I see a redistribution from a certain class of American workers to workers with similar skills in other countries, and to workers with very high skills in the US that can market those skills to a global economy. This doesn't have to be a bad thing, if the government can respond by encouraging innovation by high-skilled workers, and even encourage a lot of compensation for them, but provide for the rest with a fairly robust safety net. And, in fact, the major political cleavages of the present focus on precisely these issues. The political battles aren't about stagnation, but about distribution.
UPDATE: A few folks thought the graphs above are misleading, and they've got a point. So rather than just draw some lines in Powerpoint, I did a more reasonable comparison here. It doesn't change the substantive conclusion of this post, but it was worth doing.
I watched the HBO adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin's book last night, and I liked it quite a bit. I'm predisposed to like it, having both read the book and followed the news at the time and since then. The story is well done and accurate, the film itself is very well made. The cast is phenomenal and the acting delivers on that promise.
There isn't a whole lot of overt politics in it, but politics is like a fog hanging over everything in the story. Government actors routinely feel constrained by democratic politics, and end up being all but forced to make decisions that they despise. Politicians try to use the crisis for electoral gain. Private sector actors try to collect as many rents as they can, and in the end some of them get quite a lot, while others get nearly none. The movie is pessimistic in general.
Hank Poulsen (excellently played by William Hurt) is portrayed as something of a tortured saint overcome by events. Somewhat odd, given both his rough real-life demeanor and his involvement in the excesses that culminated in the financial crisis, but I believe the portrayal of his moral judgment is true to life. Anyway, William Hurt probably can't play anything but a noble figure -- at one point an aide tells him to get some sleep, as he looks worn down; except he doesn't -- but there is perhaps some nobility in the way Poulsen abandoned his guiding principles when events changed. I guess that's a matter of opinion.
Geithner (Billy Crudup) is a crass-talking pragmatist who seems to have no ideology at all, other than "don't let this blow up". Bernanke (Paul Giamatti) pops in from time to time to remind everyone of the gravity of the situation for the entire economy, not just their firms. I have no idea if the rest of the cast -- notables include Fuld (James Woods), Dimon (Bill Pullman), Blankfein (Evan Handler), Thain (Matthew Modine), Mack (Tony "Monk" Shalhoub), Buffett (Ed Asner), plus Topher Grace and Cynthia Nixon as Treasury Dept officials -- match their characters well or poorly, but the overall ensemble works very well. The dialogue and plot move quickly, and I fear that viewers without a fairly strong base of prior knowledge will have difficulty following what's happening. There are a few moments when characters (semi-awkwardly) try to break down what's going on for a slow-on-the-uptake staffer or Congressperson, but it's fairly clearly for the benefit of the audience. That's fine; those instances are few and brief and necessary.
Most of all, one gets the same sense from the film as from the book: nobody understood just what they were up against. Every CEO thought his (they were/are all men) firm was stronger than it was. Every regulator had no idea what was going on in those firms. Nobody understood how susceptible they were to a run. Nobody seemed to be aware of how reliant they all were on AIG, and how fragile AIG was. When Poulsen gets on his knees before Nancy Pelosi (a true anecdote), it's hard to tell whether he's asking for help or to be put out of his misery.
The story is about ignorance, throughout the financial sector and indeed the broader economy. And when things go wrong, the ignorant panic. And when panic sets in, the game's up. It's a confidence game.
The parts of the movie that fall the flattest are the ones that try to "humanize" some of the characters. Poulsen agonizing to his wife. Buffett entertaining his grandkids. Fuld cursing the gods (over and over). There isn't very much of that, but the film could still do with less. Other than those minor distractions, I liked it quite a lot.
