George Clooney as James Cramer

I have seen some of the recently released movies, among them "Money Monster" with George Clooney and Julia Roberts. I will resume this blog's intermittent relationship with popular culture by telling you something about this one.

Clooney plays the host of the eponymous television show, one based loosely on Jim Cramer's show, "Mad Money."

Jim Cramer has been accused of using that program to pump the stocks of some of his Wall Street buddies for them. In fact, former Daily Show host Jon Stewart expressed this opinion in a much-remarked-upon exchange with Cramer. I'm working from memory here, but IIRC Stewart said "I want a smart guy like Jim Cramer to help protect me from ... guys like Jim Cramer!"

Clooney's character is all moral ambivalence in the way Stewart's comment suggests. He has the gift for gab more than he has any acute sense of the markets, and he's putting on a show about money in a way that might lead some poor schleppers to believe they had not merely been entertained: that they had been informed.

That is, indeed, the plot. One such schlepper decided to get his revenge after he had lost his nest egg.

Clooney's character reforms and grows before our eyes, implausibly fast but that's show biz! He goes from one of the potential victims of the schlepper, to his ally, and together they do exact the desired revenge on the real bad guy, the one who ran the fraudulent operation about which Clooney had been thoughtlessly bullish.

So what was the fraudulent operation that forms the backstory for this story? That's where this movie has some novelty. The operation in question is, at least on the surface, a high-speed trading firm, like (to provide a real life example) Citadel LLC. Like Citadel, this fictional firm (called IBIS Global Capital) runs computers which operate on algorithms which can buy and sell in microseconds, taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities invisible to the blinking human eye. Unlike most actual high-speed traders, though, IBIS is a publicly traded company, and it was on its stock value, not on its actual trades, that the schlepper lost his nestegg.

So: why did IBIS' stock take a sudden dramatic fall? The company puts out an official line on the subject, which Clooney's character parrots to the public: that the problem was a software "glitch," a problem with the algorithm that cannot easily be explained to non-mathematicians, that led to bad trades, which became public knowledge, leading to a loss of stock value.

The schlepper [that's my term for him, it isn't used in the screenplay!] doesn't buy this explanation, though, and Clooney's character in time sees through it as well. I won't go any further, thus staying well out of spoiler alert requirements. The schlepper is played (very effectively, I think) by Jack O'Connell.

I have written a fair amount about this movie without even mentioning the part played by Julia Roberts. She's a Big Name, at the heart of the marketing, yet a precis of the movie doesn't have to mention her. What's up with that?

I don't know. But I will tell you that her character's name is Patty Fenn, and that she is the producer of Clooney's television show. Her wizardry with video effects, and her ability to keep up with the star as he ad libs and improvises his way through a program, seems to be key to its success. But she is supposed to be leaving, the episode interrupted by the angry misled investor may be the last episode of Money Monster she ever does produce.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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