We here at the blog formerly known as Movie Reviews For Greedy Capitalist Bastards have often taken a rather contemptuous tone with movies covering the financial sector. Too often they have unintentionally glamourised the very profession they purported to condemn. And with very few exceptions they have failed to show the reality of what to many of us is life in financial services. Away from the yachts and the blow and the strippers of cinema, most bankers are just insecure over-achievers, suckered into aligning their self-worth with a big-name brand, running on a treadmill where the big bonus is never as much as the next guy, increasingly doing twenty hour days, working weekends and trapped in a one percent bubble. There was systematic fraud in the last crisis and plenty of people new their was a gigantic conflict of interest. But a lot of junior bankers were just people trapped in a complex system trying to do optimise their profit and impress their boss.
