Films about high finance can be surprisingly exciting. The subject matter is usually anything but dry, and it is always centred around complicated matters at the very heart of an institution or, in this case, how society views money. WIth regard to the film, Margin Call is about the types of risks that financial institutions make or take to create wealth. For the most part, we take the system for granted. We assume that the people who run it know what they are doing. We submit to the AML IDENTITY CHECK, like those from https://www.w2globaldata.com/regulatory-compliance-solutions-and-software/aml-id-checks/, when we want to borrow or deposit money and use the services available to all of us. However, when it goes wrong, we all feel it and want to know what happened.
Margin Call centres around the sudden discovery that North America’s mortgage market will collapse. If it does, the firm that the characters work at will go bust. They haven’t factored in all the bad debtors that they have lent to over the years. This was a real situation in 2007-08 when some banks had given mortgages to unemployed people and those with nowhere near the income needed to pay back the money.
The film shows the characters thinking only of the company’s survival and not of the wider common good. They desperately try to sell off all the assets and start looking for a scapegoat at the firm to blame.