Michael Moore turns his camera on the 2008 financial collapse and the system that produced it, starting in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, where he grew up watching General Motors define the American middle class before hollowing it out. He tracks down families being evicted from foreclosed homes, sits with workers occupying the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago after it shut down without paying them severance, and reads aloud from a leaked Citigroup memo that refers to America as a "plutonomy" run for the benefit of the wealthy. He digs up corporate "dead peasant" life insurance policies that let companies profit when their own employees die, and revisits the frantic congressional vote that pushed through the Wall Street bailout. A Catholic priest tells him plainly that he considers capitalism a sin. Archival news footage, interviews with laid-off workers and economists, and Moore's own on-camera confrontations with bank offices and government buildings carry the argument, building toward his case that the crash was not an accident but the predictable result of deregulation and Wall Street's own bets.