The Big Short

New York in 2005: The dollar is strong, the economy is booming. Every day on Wall Street, enormous stock and securities trades are made. With increasingly complex real estate products, excellent returns, and seemingly minimal risk, even the unemployed become villa owners, while brokers, insurers, and bank executives are lured by quick money.

What the financial moguls, the media, and the government fail to see, the unconventional hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) immediately recognizes: he predicts the bursting of the American real estate bubble in just a few years, leading to the collapse of the global economy, which will leave millions homeless and jobless. When Burry warns of the impending disaster, no one wants to listen to him—bank executives feel too secure and dismiss his predictions. In response, Burry devises a cunning plan: the "Big Short." Through so-called "shorts," betting against the stocks of major investment banks, he teams up with other risk-taking speculators, such as the relentless trader Steve Eisman (Steve Carell), the greedy Deutsche Bank broker Greg Lippmann (Ryan Gosling), and former star investor Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), to wager against the financial system and make unimaginable profits. The disaster and absolute madness beyond all moral boundaries have begun.