James Scurlock on Fixing the Credit Mess
A lot of critics have said that you didn't stress the importance of personal responsibility–that you mostly vilify the credit card industry.
The film begins with the woman building an 11,000-square-foot brick mansion she knows she can't afford, and it goes on to radio host Dave Ramsey talking about how his Jaguar was taken away because he was stupid. You have this woman taking $4,000 cash advances on her credit card every month to pay the mortgage on a house she knew she could no longer afford. You've got this guy who bought the Abtronic, which was the dumbest thing in the world. Everyone I talked to, except for the most egregious cases of predatory lending, said, "I was stupid" or "I screwed up," and they all wanted to pay back what they owed.
But the problem I have is, do they owe what they borrowed plus a little interest or are they responsible for three, four, five times what they borrowed? That's what we used to call "usury," and that's not only unrealistic but it's ruinous. It's extremely important for people to be responsible for what they borrowed, but when you have these contracts that Harvard Law School professors can't understand, and fees and interest rates that no one can be prepared for, it's just setting people up to fail.
I know you say you're not an activist, but who needs to see your film most to make change?
The bankers. There's a real disconnect between the guys at the top and their customers. They need to understand that a lot of people are getting into trouble and losing their homes, and their lives are being destroyed. Behind every one of those bankruptcies, foreclosures, or defaulted subprime loans is a household losing its home or its life savings. It's really, really devastating.
Whom do you think real change rests upon?
Congress can certainly have the most immediate effect. They could introduce some regulation or reintroduce regulations to make the banking industry more transparent and more intuitive. In the end, though, I suspect that it's going to be Wall Street that really affects the most changes because this has become a business funded by investors. If Wall Street continues to tighten the strings, a lot of this credit is going to dry up. At the end of the day, it's going to be the banks that have the biggest problem.
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