This week I’m sending along a podcast interview I did with Geoff Alexander, host of Trade Movies. Geoff got in touch with me on tiktok after he read my Baffler essay about the municipal bond market and Mamdani.

Geoff is a lefty that’s really into movies, and he likes to interview all kinds of people on his show. He has an amazing format for the podcast: he gets in touch, asks his guests to recommend a film for him to watch that’s relevant to the topic of the interview, and then he recommends the guest watch a film he thinks is relevant to that topic. So we “trade movies” and then talk about them during the show.

Geoff had me on to talk about municipal finance, specifically municipal bonds, and the two movies we picked created a fascinating dialogue woven with philosophy, film, and finance.

After poking around, I recommended he watch Adam Curtis’s Hypernomalization because the first scenes of that mind-bending documentary are during the New York City fiscal crisis in 1975. Curtis actually has news roll taken when the city’s finance officers try to sell bonds to the banks that typically buy them, but no bankers show up. This plunged the city into one of the most intense municipal finance crises ever, ushering in neoliberalism.

Geoff asked me to watch The Saragossa Manuscript from 1965, a long, also mind-bending film by the Polish director Wojciech Has. I’d never heard of Has or the movie before, but it was really amazing. A beautiful and confusing epic with a trippy and nested set of stories in Inquisition-era Spain.

Geoff said my piece on the municipal bond market reminded him of this movie because of how chaotic, endless, and opaque it is. That’s the feeling of the film (which apparently inspired David Lynch.)

I watched the movie with Shelly while we were taking care of Sylvan our newborn, and there were some amazing lines, like this one where a character says “the human mind can take in anything if used properly.”

It was so fun riffing on these films viz. bonds. It lent itself to a much more philosophical, literary, and generally humanist encounter with municipal finance. Geoff created an index for the conversation, and the chapter titles reflect where our chat went:

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction to David Backer and His Work

00:03:25 Understanding the Bond Market and Its Implications

00:06:30 The Role of Social Movements in Education

00:09:35 Exploring the Financial Mechanisms Behind School Funding

00:12:41 The Complexity of Capital Expenditures

00:15:36 The Nature of Bonds vs. Loans

00:18:32 The Opacity of Financial Systems

00:21:45 Cinematic Reflections on Finance

00:24:24 The Saragossa Manuscript and Its Parallels to Finance

00:26:24 Philosophical Insights from Film and Finance

00:35:20 Understanding Complexity Through the Feynman Method

00:36:17 The Insanity of Modern Society and Politics

00:38:28 The Challenges of Entering Power

00:41:16 The Mechanics of Municipal Bonds

00:44:06 The Infinite Complexity of Public Finance

00:46:33 The Role of Experts in Understanding Finance

00:49:20 The Opaqueness of Private Equity

00:51:55 The Language of Finance and Its Implications

00:53:42 The Deliberate Opacity in Financial Systems

00:57:57 The Class Struggle and Financial Opacity

01:01:15 The Need for a New Approach to Power

01:03:53 Philosophical Reflections on Causality

01:06:48 The Complexity of Political Structures

01:10:01 Art and Propaganda: The Role of Surkov

01:12:06 Hypernormalization vs. Kayfabe: A Dialectical Contrast

01:18:37 Public Education: Challenges and Solutions

01:25:01 Making Education Truly Public