Hello! Welcome to the It's A Wonderful Life episode of Slate Money Goes To The Movies.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with my colleague Emily Peck.

Hello! Hello! And we are going to talk about It's A Wonderful Life, which is obviously a movie about

banking, but it's also a movie about Christmas. It's a movie about community. We are going to talk about

algorithms, amazingly. We are going to talk about intersectionality, but actually we're just going

to have a lot of fun talking about Jim Stewart and George Bailey and what happens in this movie.

Emily, who's our guest? The wonderful Kathy O'Neill, the former co-host and Slate Money herself.

Kathy O'Neill is back from an undisclosed location, so she is going to be joining us to talk about It's

A Wonderful Life coming up on Slate Money Goes To The Movies. Kathy, you chose a classic Christmas movie.

You can't shrug and slow your hands in the air on a podcast, Kathy. No one can see you doing that.

Oh, oh, right. No, no. It wasn't just shrug. It was more like a smug smile. Listen, I mean, this is not

only one of my favorite movies. I would say it's like up there. It makes me cry every single time,

including when I was preparing for this this morning. If you see like cry eyes, that's why. It's

curious financially to me. It always sparks my curiosity and interest, and I never had

the time or the reason to really delve at all into the storyline, the underlying economic storyline.

This is obviously a remake of Dickens' Christmas Carol, which had basically nothing to do with

banking. I think the original book or script that was optioned also had nothing to do with banking,

the decision to make our hero the custodian, I guess you would call it, of this little building

society. I think happened like quite a few ways into revisions. Do you think that the fact that

this movie has won lots of Oscars has become this much beloved favorite of all good thinking people?

Do you think the fact that it has that bank at the heart of it, or actually two banks at the

heart of it is part of that, or does that not actually matter? Oh, I think it matters a lot.

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