The Big Short In A New Perspective

Last night, my wife and I watched the 2015 film The Big Short after not seeing it for several years -- certainly not since Trump's return to the presidency. Not long into the film, my wife exclaimed, "This movie put Trump in the White House." If the film itself didn't directly do it -- certainly I don't remember hearing it brought up in either the 2016 or 2024 campaigns -- on watching it again, I think it characterizes a certain mindset that's grown over the past decade. Via Wikipedia,

Based on the 2010 book of the same name by Michael Lewis, it depicts how the 2008 financial crisis was triggered by the United States housing bubble.

. . . A critical and commercial success, the film grossed $133 million on a $50 million budget and received acclaim for the performances of the cast (particularly those of Bale and Carell), McKay's direction, editing, and the screenplay. The film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in addition to nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Bale), and Best Film Editing.

The action in the film involves a small set of independent market actors who are variously eccentric, contrarian, and a little naive who eventually come to the conclusion that mortgage-backed securities have matastasized into an enormous hoax, which is being maintained by the Federal Reserve, big banks, and ratings agencies, with the connivance of the media. They anticipate that it will lead to a market crash in 2007, and they make risky trades anticipating this.

However, the institutions and the media are able to keep the ball rolling until mid-2008, which creates the suspense in the film, as the red-pilled players steadily lose the confidence of their investors. The final crash and demise of investment banks like Bear Stearns vindicate them, although they recognize that nothing has changed the basic system that created the problem. Mark Baum, one of the fictional contrarians, in a debate with Bruce (actually Bill) Miller, a real-life figure known for his bullish stance on mortgage backed securities, explains a basic premise of the film:

Mark Baum: We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball... What bothers me isn't that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did.

[to his opponent, Bruce Miller] Mark Baum: And as fun as it is seeing pompous dumb Wall Streeters be wildly wrong, and you are *wrong*, sir. I just know that at the end of the day regular people are going to pay for all of this. Because they always, always do. That's my two cents. Thank you.

Deutsche Auditorium Host: Does our bull have a response?

Bruce Miller: Only that in the history of Wall Street, no investment bank has ever failed except when caught in criminal activities. So I stand by my Bear Stearns optimism.

As they speak, the stock run that will lead to Bear Sterns's demise begins, and the auditorium empties. But Mark Baum makes the real point, what probably put Trump in the White House: We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball. Or for that matter, medicine. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse outlines the effect of the big medical fraud:

Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (CoV2), colloquially referred to as “COVID-19”, was a man-made influenza (flu) virus created in a laboratory in Wuhan China, using “gain of function” research grants from the United States government. The virus escaped the laboratory and became a pandemic influenza virus as it spread throughout the world.

The response to the release of the virus, the mitigation effort, was organized by global intelligence services and coordinated through western military cooperation. The military and intelligence services coordinated the mitigation efforts with various national health services, the compliance rules and subsequent restrictions upon Americans were a downstream consequence.

Everything within the mitigation process was fraught with governmental fear, widely ridiculous panic, over-the-top reactions and a level of political pressure never before seen in modern history. All of the rules and restrictions were genuinely crazy at the time events were happening, and in hindsight review none of the mitigation efforts made any sense whatsoever. Commonsense was thrown out the window as mass formation psychosis spread like wildfire with a hurricane.

If we begin to think about the COVID crisis of 2020-2023, the financial crisis of 2008 pales in comparison -- take just this one vignette:

March 29, 2021 Rochelle Walensky, Director of CDC, infamously declared on MSNBC:

"Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick."

Emails obtained by FOIA from Jan 30, 2021 show that Walensky knew this was a lie at the time she said it.

1/12 pic.twitter.com/9rdmGuEHPM

— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) September 5, 2025

But the book on which the film was made, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, was published in March, 2010, less than two years after the 2008 crisis. As of now, we're well over two years past the worst of the COVID mandates, and we have yet to see equivalent examinations of this much bigger fraud. Think of the film that could be created about the COVID hoax.

In fact, this must certainly lie behind the astonishing congressional meltown from both parties over Secretary Kennedy's appearance last week. I'm not sure if a film equivalent to The Big Short on COVID can be made; it would come much too close to the basic fraud problem we currently have. Still, think of the careers that could be made by actors portraying Dr Fauci, Dr Birx, Dr Walensky, Donald Trump, Joe Biden. . .