Margin Call

The movie Margin Call recounts a fictionalized version of the fall of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008. The story centers around the trading floor, the company's exposure to toxic mortgage-backed securities and its responses to these challenges. The movie discusses and provides a framework for analyzing a number of financial concepts. This report will use Margin Call to discuss a number of different microeconomic concepts that are seen in the movie.

Market Failure

Lehman Brothers is ultimately a story of market failure, so this is a natural starting point for this analysis. Marker failure occurs when the "quantity of a product demanded by consumers does not equate to the quantity supplied by suppliers" (Investopedia, 2013). Market failure is evident in a number of ways, based on the story of the movie. For example, the traders are instructed to unload their positions in the toxic assets, but...
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