Fool's Gold (Widescreen Edition)

• Condition: New
• Format: DVD
• Widescreen; Color; NTSC

 From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.

Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia," as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.

The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums ! of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.

But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted -- through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed -- by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch -- even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling -- catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their b! ank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable lig! ht not o nly on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.

A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool's Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson go for the gold (and the diamonds, emeralds and rubies) as a just-divorced couple who bicker and banter their way through an adventure- and laugh-packed undersea treasure hunt. McConaughey is Finn, in love with his ex (Hudson) and in deep with gangster Bigg Bunny. After eight years of searching, Finn gets a clue to the whereabouts of the Queen’s Dowry, a fabulous fortune that mysteriously disappeared in the Caribbean! in 1715. Now all he has to do is get the gold, get the girl and get going before Bigg Bunny gets him. Directed by Andy Tennant (Hitch), Fool’s Gold glitters with danger, action, romance, comedy, great one-liners â€" and a great time to be had by all!The "gold" of the title refers to an elusive pirate's booty, but it just as easily could mean the sun-washed glistening shores of Florida, or the sumptuously tanned bodies of its appealing stars, Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. The whole film is awash in golden highlights, and the scenery and cinematography make the experience akin to taking a tropical holiday. Hudson and McConaughey reprise the chemistry they first exhibited in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, sparking and tangling and kvetching, while all the while the audience knows, of course, they adore each other and are perfect for each other. McConaughey is a dreamer, on the trail of a sunken pirate's treasure, and Hudson his now-ex-wife, a historian who pref! ers life to be a little more sedate. McConaughey, as Finn, del! ivers im passioned speeches to Hudson, as Tess, saying, "You want history? It's in the ocean, lady!" Before you can say Romancing the Stone, Tess and Finn are grudgingly reunited in search of the booty. If the plot doesn't contain many surprises, the froth of the stars' chemistry is amiable and makes for a perfect date movie. Scuba divers may find McConaughey's antics below the surface to be wildly unbelievable and usually fatal, but in the end viewers will root for him to surface, and recapture the heart of his lady love. --A.T. Hurley