What Brad Pitt thinks of the U.S. housing market

“I’m not a trader; I just play one on TV.”

Yet Brad Pitt, who plays a character based on Cornwall Capital head trader Ben Hockett in “The Big Short,” isn’t afraid to sound off on the U.S. housing market collapse. At the film’s New York premiere, he told Bloomberg, “The fact that no one was held accountable for this drives me crazy. There’s something seriously wrong. You talk to the experts now and nothing’s changed. The same practices are still going on.”

Hockett and Cornwall Capital shorted the subprime mortgage crisis market prior to its 2007 collapse, as documented in Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short.

Co-star Hamish Linklater was humbler about the financial knowledge he gleaned making the film, telling Bloomberg reporter Amanda Gordon, “CDO is the one thing that I can remember, and it’s not a compact disc organization, as it turns out.”

When Gordon asked Linklater to invent a financial term, he said, “‘FALAFEL — financial assisted laugh aha financial extra laugh aha’ before realizing that he had actually spelled ‘FALAFELA.'”

Linklater plays Porter Collins, who founded Seawolf Capital after helping predict the subprime crisis while at FrontPoint Partners.

Bloomberg asked its columnist Barry Ritholtz and Gracious Home CEO Dottie Mattison to opine on Pitt’s comments.

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Staff

The staff of Advisor.ca have been covering news for financial advisors since 1998.