The 2008 financial collapse wiped out trillions in wealth and left millions unemployed or foreclosed on, and director Charles Ferguson sets out to explain exactly how it happened and who let it happen. Narrated by Matt Narrator Matt Damon, the film moves from Iceland's banking implosion through Wall Street trading floors to the halls of Congress, building its case through interviews with economists, regulators, journalists, and the financiers themselves, several of whom grow visibly uncomfortable under questioning. Ferguson traces the chain from deregulation in the 1980s and 90s through the rise of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and he does not spare the academics who built reputations advising the same firms whose risk models failed. The film names names: Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and the ratings agencies that kept stamping toxic mortgages AAA. Its closing argument is blunt: the people responsible mostly kept their jobs, their bonuses, and their influence in Washington.