In Sundance, Davos And (Soon) A Theater Near You: Greenspan's "The Flaw"
I'm reporting to you from Sundance, where I've come to help present The Flaw, a new, yet-to-be-released documentary about the financial meltdown from director David Sington ("In the Shadow of the Moon").
The title of the documentary is an allusion to a comment Alan Greenspan made in 2008, when California Democrat Henry Waxman, then chairman of the House oversight committee, asked Greenspan if he had made any mistakes in assessing the economy. The former Federal Reserve chairman famously responded yes, the collapse shocked him. "I still do not fully understand why it happened." There was, he said, a "flaw in the model of how I perceived the world works."
The film is not only generating distribution interest at Sundance, but it also is creating buzz as far away as at Davos, where Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP Group noted that he had just seen the film and was struck by its analysis of the growing income equality in the United States. NPR's David Brancaccio, at Davos, reports that Sorrell explained that the film:
makes an argument that wealthy folk tend to invest in financial assets and create financial bubbles. If wealth is less concentrated, there may be an investment in more mass consumption, which can build more fundamentally prosperous economies.Watch the trailer of "The Flaw" here:"Concentration of wealth, particularly in the United States, is a big issue," Sorrell said.
Waxman and Greenspan are but a few of the luminaries who appear in the film. I'm interviewed in the documentary to explain that what we all want from Wall Street is something very simple. And we're still looking for it.
I'll bring you all the financial news from Sundance in my next post.
Nell Minow, dubbed "queen of good corporate governance" by BusinessWeek, is a member of the board of GovernanceMetrics International (formerly The Corporate Library, which she co-founded).
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