I’m still working on my top 10 music list for 2004 and haven’t really thought about a 2004 movie list yet, but one film that will definitely be on is the BBC’s faux documentary The Man Who Broke Britain.
Presented as a “look back” at the market crash of January 2005, the movie details the Gordian Knot of financial transactions known as derivatives – high risk contracts tied to security or commodity transactions. The upshot is this: say you have a lot of money (like a billion or so dollars) tied up in oil future derivatives. Now say you have a terrorist event affect an already unstable oil price. Now add someone on the inside that may or may not have been rigging things to implode the worst possible way.
It’s all somewhat arcane, but the movie makes it much more suspenseful than most of what I’ve recently seen. Easily the best oil finance conspiracy movie since The Formula (which may have been the last oil conspiracy movie) Of course, mainstream economists are complaining, but hey if Nick Leeson gives the methodology a thumbs up…