HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031987 Job" offers a sweeping synthesis, going as far back as the Reagan administration and as far afield as Iceland in its anatomy of the financial crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the highest-profile players declined to be interviewed. Mr. Summers appears only in news footage, and none of his predecessors or successors as Treasury secretary — not Robert E. Rubin or Henry M. Paulson Jr. or Timothy F. Geithner — submit to Mr. Ferguson's questions. Nor do any of the top executives at Goldman Sachs or the other big banks. Most of the interviewees are, at least from the perspective of the filmmaker, friendly witnesses, adding fuel to the director's comprehensive critique of the way business has been done in the United States and the other advanced capitalist countries for the past two decades. Both American political parties are indicted; "Inside Job" is not simply another belated settling of accounts with Mr. Bush and his advisers, though they are hardly ignored. The scaling back of government oversight and the weakening of checks on speculative activity by banks began under Reagan and continued during the Clinton administration. And with each administration the market in derivatives expanded, and alarms about the dangers of this type of investment were ignored. Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, presented a paper in 2005 warning of a "catastrophic meltdown" and was mocked as a "Luddite" by Mr. Summers. Meanwhile, some investment bankers — at Goldman Sachs in particular — were betting against the positions they were pushing on their customers. An elaborate house of cards had been constructed in which bad consumer loans were bundled into securities, which, were certified as sound by rating agencies paid by the banks and then insured via credit-default swaps. One risky bet was stacked on top of another, and in retrospect the collapse of the whole edifice, along with the loss of jobs, homes, pen