Andrew and Leslie Cockburn have produced the best movie of the year. American Casino tells the story of the financial crisis, which started with the meltdown in subprime lending and ended up triggering the deepest slump since the Great Depression. The Cockburn’s skillfully uncover the truth behind the headlines, shining a light on the negligent regulators, the colluding Fed, the unscrupulous ratings agencies, the mercenary banks, the venal mortgage lenders, and the long daisy-chain of opportunists and fraudsters who gorged themselves on the spoils from the biggest swindle in history. This is this generation’s big story and it is warmly conveyed by master narrators, Mr. and Mrs. Cockburn.

The movie begins in downtown Manhattan, the camera shifting quickly from one looming skyscraper to the next. This is Wall Street, the epicenter of the financial universe. With the edgy wail of bebop in the background, Cockburn fixes his lens on Senator Phil Gramm and Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, the two policymakers most responsible for the market blowup. In testimony before a congressional committee,”Maestro” Greenspan reluctantly admits that he discovered a “flaw” in his theory of how markets work. Director Cockburn contrasts Greenspan’s feeble defense with sweeping visuals of the endless rows of boarded up homes in downtown Baltimore where the foreclosure epidemic has turned large parts of the city into a ghost-town. This is the Greenspan/Gramm legacy, the triumph of deregulation.

American Casino explains the most complex aspects of the financial collapse in terms that everyone can understand. The movie is an informal tutorial on Wall Street’s “innovations”, including a brief rundown on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and credit default swaps (CDSs). These are the notorious debt-instruments which clogged the credit markets and sent stocks into a nosedive. The Cockburn’s also interview a number of people who played a part in the market crash. We get a glimpse of the ratings agency executive who caved in to the investment banks and gave them the triple A ratings they wanted, but didn’t deserve. There’s a brief segment with a mortgage lender who routinely filed false income statements which allowed unqualified loan applicants to be approved. There’s also a clip of a financial technician who packed B-rated junk into CDOs that were offloaded to gullible Korean investors. What’s most disturbing about American Casino, is that it shows how normal people eagerly participated in a profit-skimming operation that was based on repackaging and peddling dodgy loans to credulous investors. These people knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway.