Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) states to the viewers that the world of banking is extremely boring. Things changed when Lewis Ranieri (Rudy Eisenzopf) created a plan for mortgage-backed securities to ensure bigger profits with lower risks since everyone was paying their mortgages. This was big for bankers, up until the year 2008 when the global financial crisis hit. Vennett adds that a small group of individuals saw this coming.
The next scene shows hedge fund millionaire Michael Burry (Christian Bale) in his office conducting an interview with a young analyst. Burry says his wife told him he needs to "share more". He discusses having a glass eye since childhood due to losing his real eye to an illness. We see him as a child playing in a football game and being ashamed when the eye falls out. Burry continues rambling on about how the tech bubble burst in 2001, yet the housing market went up. He hires the analyst on the spot and instructs him to get him a list of the top 20 selling mortgage bonds.
The scene shifts to a counseling session where Mark Baum (Steve Carell) enters and takes over the session by complaining to everyone about an encounter he just had with a retail banker regarding his bank's overdraft policies and how he is screwing over working people. Baum despises people working in big banks, especially after his brother committed suicide after getting screwed over. He later calls his wife Cynthia (Marisa Tomei) to express his anger, which she is used to hearing about, but still thinks he should quit his job. Baum then takes a cab from another man.
Burry does his homework and reviews the list he asked for. He discovers that the housing market is being backed by subprime loans in which clients are providing fewer returns, and then decides he can bet against the housing market and profit off of it. To properly explain what a subprime loan is, Vennett (still narrating) directs us to a woman (Margot Robbie) taking a bubble bath and drinking champagne to explain that "subprime" means "shit", and that the banks created them to add more mortgages to their plans. Burry then goes to multiple banks, starting with Goldman Sachs, to express the idea that the bonds will fail and to create a credit default swap market. Thinking the bonds are secure, the bankers roll with his bet. Burry's boss Lawrence Fields (Tracy Letts) is distressed by his plan for fear of what it'll do to their own business.
Vennett learns of Burry's dealings and then meets with Baum and his team of investors - Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), and Vinnie Daniel (Jeremy Strong) - to propose to them the idea of the credit default swap. He explains that all the bad bonds can be put together into CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations). Vennett brings us to Anthony Bourdain to explain CDOs by comparing it to making a seafood stew from a bunch of fish that didn't sell too well. After Vennett leaves, Baum and his team consider taking his words seriously.
We meet young hopeful investors Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) waiting to meet with someone from JP Morgan Chase. However, they don't get far without having an ISDA agreement. Discouraged, they then find a pitch from Vennett on how the housing market is a bubble (which Shipley states isn't a completely accurate depiction of how they found out about it). They decide to jump on the credit default swap bandwagon and bring in retired trader Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to help them since they are too inexperienced to pull off the trades they need in order to profit from this.
Moses and Collins go to a neighborhood to find foreclosed houses. They encounter a renter that worries about being evicted with his son. Moses and Collins enter a home with a past due notice paper in the kitchen, and then a home with an alligator in the pool.
Burry is confronted by Fields for his betting, thinking that his plan will fail within six years. He and another investor demand their money back, but Burry refuses to give in.
Baum and his team dig further into the housing market, meeting with a real estate agent, two mortgage brokers, and even a stripper to learn about what sort of loans are given to particular customers, leading Baum to realize that the market is indeed a bubble.
By early 2007, it is reported that mortgage delinquencies have reached a new high. Baum and his team are told to give up their swaps by risk assessors. Baum has Daniel tell them to fuck off. The two meet with Georgia Hale (Melissa Leo), an officer for Standard and Poor's, and grill her over giving banks AAA percentages on subprime loans. She defends herself by saying the banks would default if they didn't get those ratings, and Baum criticizes her actions, but she fires back by noting that he and his team own multiple credit default swaps.
Vennett tells Baum and his team to pull out of their trades, as Geller tells Shipley the same thing, due to mortgage defaults going up. Shipley and the team both express their respective negative views. Rickert tells the guys, as Vennett tells his guys, to go to Las Vegas to attend the American Securitization Forum.
Plot Summary from Wikipedia - See more on en.wikipedia.org Text under CC-BY-SA license