Painful Viewing

When I really should have been organising myself for our trip to the land down under I found myself watching the excellent Inside Job, a documentary narrated by Matt Damon on the culpability of the various players in the financial collapse of 2008. Nothing terribly new here, but it was fun and darkly illuminating to be reminded of the appalling greed and hubris of the brightest and best that America has to offer. Mind you, I must admit to being a little surprised by the complete lack of any accountability regarding conflicts of interest of various academics being paid big bucks by the major financial institutions. There's a lovely moment when some bigwig economic chap from Columbia realises to his horror that he's backing himself into an impossible corner regarding his connections with big business. The rather thin sheen of charm and reasonableness suddenly gets pushed aside and for a moment you see the twerp as he really is. Instructive. I wonder what his students think of him?