The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Themes
Society and Class
As we all know, the 2008 stock market crash was pretty bad for Joe Schmo on the street.Although The Big Short focuses on the financial aspects of the 2008 stock market crash, it never forgets about...
Manipulation
Manipulation is Wall Street's bread and butter, and those dudes were eating well in the early 2000s. Through the creation of the subprime mortgage bond market, these financial big shots create an e...
Perseverance
What would you do if the entire world was telling you one thing, but your brain was telling you another? Would you sit down and shut up? Would you mutter under your breath? Or would you stand up fo...
Injustice
The Big Short might not feature any caped crusaders, chirpy sidekicks, or all-powerful supervillains, but make no mistake—this thing is all about fighting injustice. For some people, like Steve E...
Hypocrisy
Seriously, folks, the 2008 stock market crash is a case study in hypocrisy. Over the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street recorded record-breaking profits thanks to an explosion in the "subprime mortgage b...
Greed
"Greed is good."So said Gordon Gekko, anyway, the villain in 1987's Wall Street. Well, based on what we see in The Big Short, the real Wall Street took this dude's message to heart. The early 2000s...
Rules and Order
We like to think that the world operates in a fair and orderly manner, but after reading The Big Short, a post-mortem of the 2008 stock market crash, we've gotta admit that we're not so sure. The b...
Foolishness and Folly
After finishing The Big Short, there's just one question we're left asking—was the 2008 stock market crash caused by heartless scammers or straight-up idiots? On the one hand, there's a ton of fr...