Ask HN: Good documentaries about finance?

21 points

8 years ago

I have always more or less hated accounting, but recently I had to admit that it can be as well very interesting => therefore yesterday I watched:

- "Enron - The smartest guys in the room" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/?ref_=nv_sr_1): kind of funny&scary at the same time. It shows the capitalism pushed to its limits; e.g. very interesting and/or crazy the fact that (if I understood correctly) they put their "future estimated revenues" into their current balances (even if I can understand their way of thinking being that "the current employees should benefit now for a great idea which might generate returns only in the future" the foundations for the estimation can be only purely speculative).

- "Inside Job" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/?ref_=nv_sr_1): the explanation about the "Credit Default Swaps" (never heard of CDS until now) was very nice, and the interviews are probably a master example about how things look like when "ethics" don't exist. Maybe a bit too heavy on the mix of short sequences of interviews.

- "The queen of Versailles" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125666/?ref_=nv_sr_1): this was just crazy, a master example of how money can worsen your life.

Any recommendations about other finance docs?

E.g. "high frequency trading" sounds interesting => it might be interesting to know what are the technical quirks, what the people behind it are, etc... . Or maybe something that analyzes again more in depth what happend in 2008? Or maybe anything that explains well some important concepts of accounting and/or finance, based on theory and/or historical events?

For example I did find by googling "Too big to fail", "Margin Call" and "The big short" but as they all involve big names (e.g. Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Kevin Spacey), I don't understand if they're fiction or not. I'm not interested in fiction.