The cartoonist and satirist Tom Scott once coined the phrase “fiscal moron” to describe someone who, no matter how often it’s explained to them, is never going to understand the inner workings of the market.
Speaking as a paid-up member of this unfortunate group, it would never occur to me to plunge wildly on Wall Street. Unlike the participants of Dumb Money.
Two or three years ago, a whole lot of fiscal morons decided they could make a fortune by following someone who seemed to know want he was doing.
Photo: Screenshot
His name was Keith Gill and he posted regularly on YouTube calling himself Roaring Kitty.
Now before we go much further, a warning. Or rather two warnings. First, there’s an awful lot of casual swearing in the film Dumb Money, often courtesy of the always annoying Pete Davidson as Keith’s deadbeat brother Kevin.
And second, owing to my fiscal limitations, I understood about half of what was going on. And even less once they started diving into the legal ramifications of market trading.
But one thing I did understand was the Golden Rule of Finance – the ones with the gold make the rules.
For some reason the followers of Roaring Kitty have no idea of this yet. But eventually they’re going to get a crash course from the stock-market big boys.
Keith Gill is a low-level finance guy who in his spare time goes on YouTube, predicting market trends.
He becomes keen on a small hardware company called Game Stop. He calls it “interesting”. And his growing number of fans are interested because he’s interested.
Roaring Kitty’s appeal, as far as I can gather, rests on a cool name, an eye-catching red bandana and a “Hang in there” dangling cat poster behind Keith.
And turns out that’s pretty much all you need to go viral on the Internet. Remember Gangnam Style?
Keith himself has very little actual money. His followers have even less – many of them are in debt. But one thing they do have is simple faith in Keith. They’ll have what he’s having.
And up goes the Game Stop stock.
And the old guard of Wall Street are shocked to discover they’re being outflanked by these dumb money, fiscal morons.
Dodgy hedge-funds often gamble that companies like Game Stop will go broke, not go through the roof.
So – at least I followed this bit - battle lines are drawn between the elite Wall Street ratbags and the plucky little army of average Joe, fiscal morons.
And for a while everything goes the way that Roaring Kitty followers hope it might.
Director Craig Gillespie did a nice job on another tortuous, fact-based drama, I Tonya, but Dumb money proves more of a challenge – if only to keep up with what’s going on.
The message seems to be that a system designed to make small fortunes has been subverted by people out to make obscene fortunes. Possibly the producers – the Winkelvoss twins of Social Network notoriety – helped with the technical stuff.
The cast is endearing though, particularly Paul Dano as the oddly naïve Keith Gill, up against the powers of capitalism. And Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio and Nick Offerman have fun playing the capitalists who take a beating. For a while.
In the end the story of Dumb Money was a bit like a good run at a Las Vegas casino. Lots of excitement, huge amounts of money appearing, being distributed and then vanishing without a trace. And of course the house nearly always wins.
But if you went in expecting it to work out any differently, you’re even more of a fiscal moron than I am!
