Money On Film: Margin Call
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to a very special Money On Film miniseries!
Over three episodes, Slate Money’s Felix Salmon and Slate culture writer Nadira Goffe revisit three films at the intersection of culture and finance. On this episode, we’re headed to Wall Street to watch a Felix Salmon favorite: Margin Call, the 2011 thriller-drama starring a long list of famous people, including Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, and yes, Kevin Spacey.
Directed by J. C. Chandor, the film takes place at an investment bank on the brink of the Great Financial Crisis, as financiers struggle to maintain their balance sheets against the greatest villain of the aughts: mortgage-backed securities.
Coming up on Money On Film: the 2025 rom-com Materialists, followed by the animated masterpiece Spirited Away from 2001. See you next time!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Money on Film. |
| 0:10.7 | I'm Felix Hammond of Slate Money. |
| 0:13.8 | And I'm Nadiragov, culture writer at Slate. |
| 0:16.2 | We're here because we watch movies. |
| 0:19.4 | Uh-huh. |
| 0:20.1 | And, well, Slate Money has for a while done this sort of intermittent series called Slate Money |
| 0:25.7 | goes to the movies. |
| 0:26.8 | It turns out that there's a lot of money in a lot of movies. |
| 0:31.9 | And so I thought that we could get together and talk about three in particular. |
| 0:36.6 | Three movies which touch on money. |
| 0:39.1 | We are going to be talking about materialists, |
| 0:41.6 | which is personal finance, dating, |
| 0:45.2 | how much money you have and how that places you in the world. |
| 0:48.7 | We are going to be talking about spirited way, |
| 0:51.1 | which is an absolutely heart-breakingly gorgeous fairy tale, but is also |
| 0:57.4 | a very sophisticated economic allegory about Japan in the late 90s and the early 2000s. |
| 1:04.9 | In this very special, amazing crossover event episode, we are going to be talking about one of my favorite |
| 1:13.3 | films, which is margin call. So we're going to talk about margin call on video. Yes. Luckily, |
| 1:22.3 | if you want to see my very confused face, as Felix talks about mortgage-backed securities, then you can do that because |
| 1:29.7 | we are currently filming in Slate Studios where you can find all these episodes of money on film on |
| 1:34.7 | YouTube. |
| 1:36.7 | Margincull, which I watched for, I think, the fourth time to prepare for this. |
... |
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