This was a timely in-flight film to set me up for a week-long seminar on leadership. Over a thirty-six hour period in 2007 we see Wall Street risk analysts and trading desk heads passing bucks and blowing whistles to floor heads and senior executives and division heads and chief risk officers and, finally, the amoral, world-weary CEO, played very well by Jeremy Irons. Basically, his trading firm (said to have been modelled on Lehman Brothers) is horribly over exposed to toxic assets. Fire sales, mass layoffs, sacrificial lambs and rolling heads are the only solutions. Irons’s figure, John Tuld, is unmoved. He has seen it all before. Survival is the name of the game. The next bull market will surely be along sooner or later. In the meantime, though… Well, we all know what happened next.
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