Michael Moore turns his camera on the 2008 financial collapse and the decades of deregulation that preceded it, tracing how home foreclosures, factory closures, and a taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailout hit ordinary families while banks kept their bonuses. He interviews evicted homeowners standing in their own front yards, airline pilots who qualify for food stamps, and workers at Chicago's Republic Windows and Doors factory who occupy the building after it shuts down without notice. Corporate documents surface showing companies taking out secret life insurance policies on employees, nicknamed 'dead peasant' policies, that pay the company, not the family, when a worker dies. Moore follows the money into government, showing former Goldman Sachs executives moving into Treasury Department posts under both Bush and Obama. Archival news footage of the bailout vote and the market crash is cut against home movies of families packing boxes on their lawns. The film's argument is blunt: capitalism didn't fail by accident, and the people who benefited from the failure were the ones writing the rules.