Mises Institute of Canada article on The Bubble films

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The Audience Award winner The Housing Bubble has already been seen in over 70 countries and is being hailed as the “best economics documentary of all time!”

| Ron Paul | Jim Rogers | Jim Grant | Marc Faber | Doug Casey | Peter Schiff |
| David Stockman | Gene Epstein | Joseph Salerno | Robert Murphy |
| Mark Thornton | Jeff Herbener | Roger Garrison | Peter Wallison | Patrick Barron |

8.6 *’s on IMDB

Mises Institute of Canada article on The Bubble films

The idea was simple: Track down the people who predicted the housing crash and ask them what’s next.

35,000 miles and four years later, we’re test screening our first documentary “The Bubble” and finishing editing the follow up “The Bigger Bubble.” When this all started, I was literally hanging off the side of a house. I had dropped out of college to pursue a film career in 2006 and, thinking entrepreneurship was as simple as following the money, I dove headfirst into painting houses to fund my projects. This worked out great at first, but like pretty much everyone in the world, I was blindsided by the crash of the housing bubble.

At the time, I hadn’t even heard of the Mises Institute, but somehow I came across their audiobook of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, and when I heard it, I knew what I had to do. If this guy could describe our housing bubble in a book that came out in 1946, why couldn’t a documentary do that before the next crash? I didn’t want to make the same mistakes again, and I assumed most of the people that got screwed didn’t either.

After interviewing investors like Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, and Peter Schiff, as well as economists like Joseph Salerno, Robert Murphy, Mark Thornton, Roger Garrison, and Jeff Herbener, it was clear to me that there were two stories to tell. There’s the historical aspect and then there’s the current events that are affecting people today. Just like some people like to skip to the end of a book, splitting the documentary into two films allows those people to skip the history and learn just about the bubbles they’re caught up in now. So the first film covers everything from the panic of 1920 to the causes of the housing bubble in the last decade.

The second film starts with the bailouts in 2008 and brings the audience to the precipice of the next crash. Bush and Obama both saw spending as the way out of the crash. Bush’s stimulus bill passed under the guise that he’d allow people to get some of their tax money back with an encouraging message to go out and buy a car or a big TV. There were lots of problems with this plan, first and foremost that there wasn’t any money left to give out. The government had already spent it and then some. But Bush knew a guy that had the power to create money out of thin air, and he wasn’t just prepared to use him in times of need, he’d been using him all along. Bush and the Federal Reserve had already been creating a billion dollars a day to stave off the dot com crash and in doing so, they created a housing bubble.

So when the crash finally came and everyone was realizing all that wealth was an illusion, you would think that would be the time to buckle down and start saving again, but Presidents Bush and Obama had other ideas. The economy needed to restructure away from the housing and financial sectors to things that consumers around the world not only wanted, but could afford. But the government didn’t want to deal with that transition. They wanted to keep things the way they were. Keeping things the way they were is great for the people, or banks really, who already own houses, but what about the people who’ve never owned a home? They’re forced to subsidize these overpriced houses and they don’t even get to live in them. Not only that, most of them are loaded with student loan debt and couldn’t afford to buy a house even if price fell by 50%. When previous generations finished college, they had jobs to look forward to and once they’d saved enough to afford it, houses too. When people graduate today, they have the debt load of a homeowner, but with no house or job to go with it. How are these people supposed to start businesses when they’re starting off with more debt than if they’d already run one or two businesses into the ground?

On the way to Dave Wordinger’s test screening in Spokane, I found a replica of the Washington Monument in the mountains of Montana. Why did a bunch of workers get together to waste those resources on a useless tower? Because Herbert Hoover said so. During the Great Depression, Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt both thought they could borrow and spend their way to prosperity, but after they kicked the can down the road, those workers were once again unemployed and their time and resources had been squandered, not to mention their growing share of the national debt. Hoover left office with 25% unemployment and by the end of the ‘30s, FDR was still dealing with 19%. They even destroyed crops in an attempt to bail out farmers by keeping the prices of their products up. You would think the average person would see how this hurts the poor, but these aren’t average people; they’re politicians. After Bush used executive orders to give the car companies cash bailouts, Obama oversaw Cash for Clunkers, a program that destroyed used cars in order to get people to buy new ones. Great for the car companies and the people whose new cars were subsidized, but what about the poor people whose used car they were trying to save up to buy was literally filled with concrete? Intervention after intervention has left us with the slowest recovery since the Great Depression. It took creating $3 billion a day to get the economy to this point. Was it really worth it? Sure, they’re building luxury homes again, but is that really what America needs? Sure, Americans and their government can afford all this debt at 0% interest rates, but what about when they go back up to 10%? Or when they go back up to 20%? Or higher? Interest on the debt would consume the entire federal budget.

Some recovery.

Co-written by NY Times bestselling author Tom Woods, THE HOUSING BUBBLE is a critical, non-partisan examination of the policies and events that shaped the United States economy into one bursting bubble after another.

Traveling the world for answers after starting a house painting business just in time for the crash, filmmaker Jimmy Morrison drove over 35,000 miles to track down the experts who saw it coming, seeking to understand the root causes, so that we can avoid being blindsided by the bigger bubbles and the inevitable crises that follow.

Informative, eye-opening, fresh, funny, and occasionally shocking, THE HOUSING BUBBLE skillfully de-mystifies the boom/bust link between the stock market, the FED, and the housing market for the economist and layperson alike.

Bonus Features include The Story Behind The Bubble films, which began shooting in May of 2011.  An early teaser premiered at Freedom Fest in front of over 1,300 people in 2012, followed by a panel featuring Tom Woods, Peter Schiff, Doug Casey, and Gene Epstein.  The film was finally shown there in 2018, winning an Audience Award at the Anthem Film Festival.  They added 50 seats after 250 were filled and there were still over a dozen people who stayed to watch from the hallway through the door.  The film was released digitally on June 26, 2019 with a sold out NYC Premiere at the legendary Angelika Film Center.  This panel was moderated by Fox Business’s Liz Claman and featured Jim Grant, Peter Schiff, Gene Epstein, David Tice, Tom Woods, and Jimmy Morrison.

Please help spread the word by joining our street team and contribute finishing funds for the sequel The Bigger Bubble!

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Events have included Mises University, the Anthem Film Festival, Anarchapulco, Hillsdale College, Mises Canada, Mises Poland, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, Mises Estonia, Freedom Fest, & the Mercatus Center.

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Written by: Jimmy Morrison | Tom Woods Narrated by: Naomi Brockwell Produced by: Jimmy Morrison | David Tice | Naomi Brockwell | Jeff Moe Edited by: Matt Hartman Music & Sound by: Jake Dilley Motion Graphics by: Fernando Castillo

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Written by Jimmy Morrison