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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

PREVIEW: Brokenomics | The Big Short

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

lotuseaters.com

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4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dan reviews the film ‘The Big Short’.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and welcome to Broconomics. Now, in this episode, I have been asked many, many times to, because I did the review of Margincourt, my favourite financial movie, I've been asked many, many times to cover the big shorts.

0:12.9

And, well, if it is demanded, then so I shall provide. This is going to be my review of the big short and a little, well, actually, it's mostly

0:21.4

an explanation of what went on using the movie as a prop, but, you know, it gets us to the same

0:27.3

place. Right. Now, before we go into the movie itself, which you can, apparently you can buy on

0:33.8

YouTube or presumably a whole bunch of other places, Prime and whatever.

0:38.4

Before we get into that, I thought, let's give a few minutes just on the background of what

0:44.0

led up to it, because it was a kind of perfect storm of factors that led into it.

0:49.0

I want to start the story.

0:50.2

You could start the store in a number of places, but I want to start it in 1997, 1998, the Asian financial crisis.

0:58.3

This was basically a whole bunch of Asian economies and Russia, wrecking up far too much debt,

1:06.1

a bit like the Western world is today, and the Western world doesn't seem to have any problem with it,

1:10.4

because it seems to think, you know, debt crisis is what happens to other countries, not us.

1:15.9

But anyway, the Asians got there first.

1:19.2

That blew up rather nastily.

1:22.1

And emerging economies, Asian economies, they started thinking, okay, well, let's keep our money in the US, because that would obviously be better.

1:33.1

And it basically started to channel a whole load of money towards the US.

1:39.4

That sloshes around and ultimately ends up in houses, in mortgages, because it's got to go somewhere.

1:45.4

That's the route that it went. It was a path of least resistance for a whole bunch of reasons,

1:49.2

regulatory reasons, cultural reasons and so on. So massive gluts of capital comes into the US,

1:56.3

starts to push houses higher from about, you know, 99, 2000 onwards. I remember this is just when I was

2:03.6

getting into, getting out of university and starting to look for a house and just every year

2:10.0

houses just went up and up and up. Same in the US, same across the Western world. The next

...

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