re: The Big Short (spoiler free)

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And The Big Short was always a book about the market side failures of the system leading to/during the crisis. If you want to get more of the government's/Fed's involvement, you should try Too Big To Fail. There's only so much of this complex story you can cover in 2 hours.

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The book and movie also ignored a missing element - that government policy emphasized "affordable housing" and emphasized increasing home ownership rates as if the outcome measure was more important than the obvious risk of that outcome measure. The movie even deliberately belittled those tempted to make the argument that people taking out these loans had a hand in the crisis by branding this group as "poor people and immigrants" rather than the more common sense branding of "entitled citizens that should have remained as renters instead of taking out loans they couldn't afford to become home owners by stupidly committing to adjustable rate loans". But obviously a good crisis sells better when there are corporate villains instead of Joe Citizens as villains.

Overall, I loved this treatment of the book. The cutaway celebrity cameos to explain some of the more complicated explanations made the content seem so much more attainable - if Selena Gomez can appear to understand it, so can I.

Christian Bale stood out to me as the kind of an actor that can become a character, unlike numerous famous actors that merely play themselves in every role.

SPOILER ALERT:

At the end...the economy collapses.