I believe it was very simple.
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McEwansExported — 14 years ago(March 08, 2012 08:26 PM)
Listen, you really have no idea how this works. Your thread title suggests you are a finance student - good news is as a student you have chance to learn, bad news is you are a finance student which makes it probable you think you have things worked out and technically you possibly do but a text book is not the real world.
In simple terms, top executives have so much information coming from so many different sources with so many flavours of accuracy and motivations for why people are telling them what they are telling them and so many considerations around how investors will perceive the company's results and actions that they DEMAND people to speak in plain English and not to share their homework but just get to the nitty gritty. They are paid to make decisions, not sit and listen to junior staff's eureka moments.
It is not the technical stuff they are asking about, yes they know that, its the interpretation and opinion they are asking to hear to triangulate against other inputs they have had as well as their own intuition.
This film was scary accurate in its portrayal of how the top guys react. Been there and got the t-shirt!
Come back in 20 years and let's see how you think about your post.
A company is like a tree of monkeys - when at the top and you look down, all you see are smiling faces, and those looking up, all they see are arse holes. -
Bozohead — 14 years ago(March 18, 2012 07:23 AM)
You're young. You still think people in position of authority ALWAYS are competent. Quite often they're not.
If you're beloved Wall Street managers, aka Masters of the Universe, were so brilliant and on top of their game why was there the GFC?
Sam and Will were more than capable of understanding the charts. I think at first they were a bit unwilling to wade through the charts and just wanted Peter to quickly explain it to them.
I will concede that the film makers had a little fun Jeremy Irons' character. -
ThatGuamGuy — 14 years ago(March 31, 2012 07:46 PM)
"This one point to me gave away the writers slant and made them look like utter fools in this regard."
Why would you chalk this up as a political thing? If the writers wanted to show a political slant that was anti-big business (as you seem to imply), wouldn't they say that the big bosses like Jeremy Irons did understand the risk and knowingly participated in it?
I'm not saying you're wrong that the characters would or wouldn't have known, but the writers did that to make the things that they're talking about make sense to audience members. This is a thing that was so complicated that (in real life) even most of the smartest guys in the room apparently didn't see it coming until it was biting them in the ass, so it's probably a bit difficult to explain correctly in less than two hours. I think "Explain it to me in plain English" is the way to go, and if it bothers you that they all should've understood immediately, chalk it up to "it was the middle of the night, everybody was tired." -
mojorising_you — 13 years ago(April 18, 2012 12:32 AM)
I think CEOs ask lower level people to explain it as if they know nothing so the CEO is getting the information direct from the source unfiltered. It isn't that he's dumb, though there are a lot of dumb CEOs out there, its just that they get info through the levels, retold many times and it may not resemble what it started out as. Remember the Telephone Game?
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sellis1 — 13 years ago(May 15, 2012 10:34 AM)
I've just read this entire thread and I have a new idea that no one else has thought of: those characters might be saying "just speak plainly" or something like that so that the audience can understand the issues!
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Trackmaster — 13 years ago(June 06, 2012 09:04 AM)
It would be a flaw to assume that a CEO and the higher-ups at Fortune 500 companies are merely salesman who take clients out of lunch and cocktails in the 21st century, with Sarbanes Oxley and a very competitive environment. But I think that it's not so much a flaw because many who attain those positions are also very humble, and try to deflect glory from themselves.
Plus, any executive knows that the most direct form of communication is one that is acceptable for a layman, so there is no confusion. Napolean instructed all correspondance from generals to be written so that a private could understand it. -
Jakezen — 13 years ago(March 22, 2013 05:54 PM)
"I think that it's not so much a flaw because many who attain those positions are also very humble, and try to deflect glory from themselves"
They get those high positions because they are not humble but aggressive and competitive. Which is not to say that is a bad thing. -
lbrad2001 — 13 years ago(June 07, 2012 07:59 AM)
Gonna have to disagree. The various financial positions of a company like this are so vast that no one person could possibly understand all of it. That's like saying The President of The United States has full understanding of all military and intelligence matters. That being said I'm sure the meetings shown in the movie would have been more technical in nature in reality. However would simply throwing in more "market-speak" imply that the people in charge have a better understanding of the market, or simply a bigger vocabulary? It also would have made the movie considerably more boring which is why most of the lingo is cut out.
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Jelly-4 — 13 years ago(July 04, 2012 05:14 PM)
Yeah I thought those scenes were more for the viewer. Jeremy IRons asking the analyst to put things in plain English is so that the audience knows what's happening and put some context before the trading scenes play out. The avg. viewer isn't going to understand all the financial jargon so they had to put it as plainly as possible and repeat it several times.
I didn't think for a minute that in real life someone in Jeremy Irons' position wouldn't know what's going on.
Are the boardroom scenes realistic? No. Do they make for better movie making? Yes. -
lancedulak — 13 years ago(July 05, 2012 06:42 AM)
You have a huge shock coming. I'm also shocked (not really.. you are a business/finance major you guys arent known for brains or creativity in general) that you dont realise very very few people in the financial sector even understand all of their quadrant of the economy. It's rather shocking that you dont realise this is something like what just happened in the US.
In the US crash 99% of wall street had no clue that there was danger in what was happening. The low level bankers pushing loans out the door as fast as possible didnt really know.. all they knew was they could resell loans as fast as they could make them. The bankers knew they owned the ratings companies and could include high risk and low risk loans and resell them to mega-investors .. as low risk loans. Because they owned the ratings companies. The ratings companies employees knew they were under no risk because their bosses told them to rate the loans A. The investors "knew" the industry was regulated therefore loans they bought as A loans were good investments. Noone saw how this could cause a collapse. Even the thieves at the top thought it would just cause a little pain to the megainvestors. A FEW people on wall street got it.. sortof reversed the process betting on the loans collapsing and got insanely rich. Heres the thing. There were a handfull of thieves at the very very top who set it in motion. There were a handfull of midlevel rating experts who got that corruption was going on. Noone but those few who bet against the scheme had any clue as to the whole system.. or what was going to happen.
Or more simply there are maybe 50 people in this country who can accurately explain derivatives. There are probably ten times that who know it is going on to this day.. exactly as it was before. The fact that an econ student doesnt understand.. any of this.. should tell you that the upper level suits dont either. -
detroit-velvet-smooth — 13 years ago(August 05, 2012 12:42 PM)
I think people are being a bit dim here. The best explanation for why he wanted them to speak in as plain terms as possible was becuase he knew that as long as you understood the system and the language that you know how to play with it and change it around. They are salesmen and they and hucking a product. When asses are on the line, and something this huge happens it makes perfect sense for the big guy to say "spare me the BS, and just get to the point because I already understand it in theory but don't know the actual implications of what has happened and I don't want you equivocating and using verbal sleight of hand to ass cover."
Basically, I see it as the big boy doesn't want to be handled. Remember when they went in one of them warned "Just tell the truth, nobody here is smart enough to lie, even the rocket scientist." I see this as corroborating the above sentiment. He may sound and speak simply and act like you have to dumb it down, but really maybe he's just handling them.
When he starts rifling off recession and crash years it seems to me that he's pretty well educated on the market and its history and a guy like that doesn't seem like the type to not know whats happening today but be well versed enough to recite off every crash since the formation of the republic.
Just a thought. -
Korios — 13 years ago(August 28, 2012 02:39 AM)
This was indeed a huge plot fault yet it was clearly a deliberate plot fault, a "plot device" as they call them. It is quite simple : you cannot make a film out of charts or numbers on a computers screen or sheets of printed text. You have to use dialog. And you have to use an average Joe dialog, one that can be understood by everyone but really dumb ones. So they made the top heads economics illiterate so that we could make sense of what was taking place via the dialog. However a deliberate plot fault is still a plot fault, so your points are valid.
signature start:
The term "suspension of disbelief" was coined by LOLW, the League of Lazy Writers. -
Ace_101 — 13 years ago(September 24, 2012 05:58 AM)
Dude, I'm a Finance student myself (2nd year of my MBA) and while I agree that the CEO or the HOD must understand the situation, they are not really required to really delve into it. At that higher post, you are not really supposed to know the tiny details but rather managing the people under you and making sure everyone is achieving the targets.
BTW, I'm 25 and I'm considering giving the first level of CFA next June. Have you given it?
RISE -
sexualbanana — 13 years ago(September 30, 2012 10:00 PM)
It's fairly simple:
- The average audience member doesn't know the terminology or the industry, so some exposition needs to occur, otherwise the audience is just going to waste 2 hours listening to people speak gibberish.
- If you can explain a complex concept in simple language, then you actually understand the concept. It's a way to filter out the BSers and the competent people.