by Dirk Ehnts
When bubbles burst … some Norwegians are unhappy. This is an unusual thing, enough so that a film crew was sent to make a 90 minute feature on the question of why. I have seen the movie as a sneak preview at the Minsky Summer Seminar together with some of the academics that appeared in the movie. They know where their comparative advantage is, and have been lecturing without any super star ambitions.The movie is quite nice. The film team is going to the US to explore what happened to the money. The good Norwegians visit Detroit and are shocked. The images of Detroit show a city in despair, with homes foreclosed and sold on the market for little more than $10,000. The documentary part is interrupted by interviews with economists that had been predicting the way the crisis would evolve before it happened. The story told is thus far the best of the recent movies (Inside Job, Margin Call) that dealt with the crisis (although ‘Inside Job’ basically tells the same story). While the explanation is certainly not new, the visual images do their part to fully grasp the width of the story. When in the 1980s Gordon Gekko ‘proved’ that greed is good, this movie will hopefully lead young people to abandon careers in finance and work on something more useful. I leave you with the trailer:
[video:vimeo:36766296]
About the
Author
Dr. Dirk Ehnts is a research assistant at the Carl-von-Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Germany). His focus is on economic integration and economic geography, covering trade, macro and development. He is working at the chair for international economics since 2006 and has recently co-authored a book on Innovation and International Economic Relations (in German). Ehnts has written at his own blog since 2007: Econblog 101. Curriculum Vitae.
