Inside job

Director Charles (No End in Sight Oscar nominee) Ferguson uttered a bitter "Firstly" head-note before accepting his 2011 Best Documentary Oscar for Inside Job. Three years after the worst financial crisis in 70 years and the biggest set of frauds in its history, he stated, the US finance industry has not seen a single member go to jail.

Ferguson's angry documentary report is a damning brief for America's prosecutors. The chances of them acting on its expose of systemic corruption are as slim as a threadbare dollar bill. So-called victimless crime is part of the American social fabric and a keystone of its economy, which lost US$20 trillion because of it in 2008, losses (in savings, jobs and homes) borne by few in the upper ranks of the financial industry itself.

Matt Damon lent (or rented, at union rates, probably) his liberal voice to the documentary as its narrator, and a pair of young documentary editors, Chad Beck (No End in Sight) and Adam Bolt (The Recruiter), joined Ferguson in the writing of the well-researched script (whose filming locations included Iceland, Paris and China).

Many of the guilty parties can be identified from the many captions noting that they refused to be interviewed. They will be glad they didn't when they see the mess a pair of top US economics professors get into when they try to skate past their well-paid PR work for the finance industry.

As Ferguson illustrates, the Obama administration is as much a Wall Street puppet as any of the preceding administrations since Donald Regan initiated Ronald Reagan's unleashing of the deregulation demons. Ferguson also goads defenders of the status quo by comparing bonus-addicted financiers to coke addicts and users of another service industry, prostitution. He points out that US government lawyers were happy to use personal failings to strip power from fraud-fighting Eliot Spitzer, but not from any criminal merchant banker, hedge fund manager, industry regulator, credit ratings agency or Washington politico.

Iceland's microcosmic case study is an opening blast that reveals the absurd dimensions of post-Reaganomics financial and governance delusions. As the French finance minister comments pithily about the Lehman collapse, "Holy cow". Forcing Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy sparked recognition of the so-called Financial Crisis, and the ritual slaughter of Wall Street's least-loved villain is a detective thriller awaiting another documentary feature. The media's gorging on lobbyists' lies, advertising revenue and bribes is another area not covered by Ferguson in this indictment of a cabal of financial, academic and political fraudsters who've controlled the US for more than three decades for the benefit of only themselves and their clans.

A frightening horror movie, Inside Job reminds its viewers that another crisis is inevitable, but it's preaching to a small choir, even with an Oscar to give it a little extra light.