The Big Short, Adam McKay’s 2015 financial lecture masquerading as a high-profile comedy pitting banking snobs versus investor slobs, spent much of its run time warning people away from the sorts of behaviors that led to the banking collapse of the mid-2000s. (Unless they’re the sort of smart, quirky outsiders who can profit from that kind of hubristic fall while still launching McKay-esque one-liners, anyway.) Now it’s looking like the movie may have actually had an impact on some real-life transactions, extending its financial influence beyond the betting pool for last year’s Best Picture Oscar.
That’s per a recent Bloomberg story, which cites a report released by financial analysts Morgan Stanley on the sub-prime auto loan market. (“Sub-prime” meaning “shit,”as Margot Robbie taught us all from within her banking-lecture bubble bath.) According to the analysts, “Concerns about growing recessionary risks—and perhaps even the popularity of the recent movie The Big Short—have motivated investors to investigate any potential source of weakness” in the market, which involves the buying and selling of auto loans with a higher than average risk of going into default. (The auto market has boomed in the last few years as the housing market has shrunk and stabilized, presumably because investors have thoroughly analyzed its risks and rewards and concluded that baby needs a new pair of shoes.)
Given how much energy McKay has put over the years into warning people about the causes of the crippling financial crisis, we can only assume he’d be happy to be cited in the report. Meanwhile, we haven’t seen any studies yet on how The Revenant has affected people’s attitudes about getting savagely attacked by bears.