Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

How do you do a film on what caused the 2nd Great Depression and not point a finger at the Federal Reserve, a group of the biggest banks you've all heard of by their various names? How do you not point to government policies encouraging loaning money to people who you'd know, if you actually LOOKED at their finances, couldn't pay when times got tough? How do you not point to the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the failures? How do you take the words of criminals such as Eliot Spitzer and Barney Frank, the latter who obviously manipulated much of this? This film smelled of an immature and deliberately limited approach of "greed is bad," complete with hookers and blow. This failed to show how government manipulation made problems WORSE, and instead tried to blame everything on "deregulation." The editing was also very sneaky. At several points, the interviewer of people who were admittedly thugs asked a question or made a snide comment, then the interview was cut away from, so that the response, if any, was skipped. I agree that said thugs were contributors to the problem, but the aim seemed to be to pretend that they were the whole problem, and regulation was the cure. To pitch that is to ignore all the government-sponsored rip-offs that occurred between 1933 and 1980 (for more complete info, read Joe Plummer's "Dishonest Money.") Frankly, I agree with 80% of what this film had to say. Unfortunately, it misses or ignores the most important 20% I've tried to address above, and uses some fairly typical anti-market propaganda to cloak the obvious truth: the government hand washes the bankers hand, and the bankers hand washes the government bureaucrats and politicians hand. This is the REAL story of the failure of republic. You cannot expect governments to protect you from the "evil bankers." The government will coddle them and help them screw you every time. The only chance you have against the "evil bankers" is a truly free market, in which those bankers cannot use the violence of the state to manipulate you. It's no accident that the two great depressions, all the greatest wars and violence, and the blessings of modernity stolen from us have all happened since the institution of the US Federal Reserve system. THAT is the real story.