It's good to see financial products inspiring prime-time television drama and the BBC-produced Freefall, which aired on TV One last Sunday night, was a real credit to CDOs.
(Do I have to spell out still that CDO stands for Collateralised Debt Obligation? Has the acronym now entered the collective
consciousness as shorthand for inscrutable and unstable investment products? These are questions for debate amongst sub-editors.)
For those who did more interesting things on Sunday night, Freefall followed the fates of three main characters - a CDO packager, a mortgage broker and his security guard former schoolmate - from the peak of the boom in 2007 until the market collapse a year later.
Although the reviews I flicked through were generally positive, like these two in The London Paper and The Guardian, there were a few complaints about the 'obviousness' of the plot and characters. The Daily Telegraph, for example, whinged about its "complete lack of subtlety". The mortgage broker character, Dave, in particular irked the reviewer, James Walton, who said it was "such a caricature... [it] was impossible to see how Dave could ever have taken anybody in".
Walton has clearly never had much to do with the money business. I've met plenty of Daves - if anything I thought the Freefall character was underplayed.
And while it did clunk a bit occasionally, Freefall was a decent attempt to tell the credit crunch story - I quite liked it, especially the end where Dave was resurrected as an 'eco' product salesman.
Maybe it wasn't as good as Shakespeare's take on debt obligations, The Merchant of Venice, but he didn't need a character to explain the ins and outs of CDOs to his audience. It was simple in the 16th century, when debt was uncollateralised and you paid with a pound of flesh.
- David Chaplin
