The biggest stories in the financial markets in the 2020s have resolved around silliness. The bizarre nature of modern markets has taken different forms, but you’ve never needed a finance degree to understand that these stories have been a bit unserious. An oddball crypto CEO depressed markets for months when he took money from depositors at his crypto exchange, gave it to his hedge fund, and invested it in made-up coins whose value was tied to confidence in his own business. A Reddit and YouTube poster proved he can shift the value of a public company by billions of dollars by posting a meme with no words in it. Retail investors more or less directly donated millions of dollars to the people to whom Bed Bath & Beyond owed money, propping up the company’s stock price as it slipped into bankruptcy. The money is real but the actions are all ridiculous, and the people committing them are either amateurs or fraudulent, boy-wonderish CEOs with funny haircuts.
One of the virtues of Industry, the HBO drama closing in on the end of its third season, is that the show knows that unsophisticated outsiders do not have a monopoly on destructive financial decisionmaking. The meme stock story of 2021 wasn’t just the result of aggressive, starry-eyed young men with Robinhood accounts, but of a market misread by seasoned hedge fund bosses. Multiple investment banks lost billions of dollars that same year because they allowed a known financial crook to borrow their money and make opaque stock bets with it. One of those banks, Credit Suisse, required a buyout afterward, ending a nearly 170-year history as a standalone company so that it could avoid bankruptcy.
With one episode left in Industry’s season, the series has homed in on professionals wearing suits as the ones making bad financial decisions. Industry is more about the people within markets than the markets themselves, but a fictional legacy investment bank called Pierpoint is the show’s backdrop. One of Industry’s through lines thus far is that it artfully uses real-world financial hackery to tell stories about its characters. The financial plot that underpins Season 3 is quite dumb, but not any dumber at all than what the real world has produced over the past few years. What would be good fodder for a congressional subcommittee that wants to yell at executives also, it turns out, makes fine television.
The season’s financial stage is a real-life furor over environmental, social, and governance investing, also known as ESG investing. The approach gained steam in the 2000s and 2010s as financial institutions sought to tell an idealistic story about their investments. Not only would a faceless asset manager or big bank make money by picking good stocks, it would pick good businesses that were somehow making the world a little better, and improving their own prospects as they did. A company could improve its ESG score in all sorts of ways—maybe by working on renewable energy, or by having a woman on its board, or even just by getting really good at recycling around the office. By the early 2020s, ESG had two camps of hopping-mad detractors: capitalists who thought it wasn’t lucrative and conservatives who thought it wasn’t conservative. Ron DeSantis called ESG “a worldwide effort to inject woke political ideology across the financial sector, placing politics above the fiduciary duty to make the best financial decisions for beneficiaries.” The Republican Party, among ideological allies elsewhere, hates it.
Pierpoint, the fictional bank at the center of Industry, borrowed oodles of money to invest in ESG-focused companies that turned out to be big stinkers. Late in the season, those loans are coming due soon, and Pierpoint doesn’t have the money. Analyst Harper Stern (Myha’la), who landed at a hedge fund after Pierpoint fired her for some light insider trading last season, overhears a warning about the bank’s vulnerability from a bathroom stall. (“Edge,” she calls that.) Harper’s hedge fund pummels Pierpoint’s stock with a massive short sale, leaving the 150-year-old investment bank on the brink of collapse entering the finale.
Harper is both an antihero and the closest thing the show has to a protagonist. She demonstrates the benefits of ideological flexibility in money. A few episodes prior, after starting the season at an ESG-focused firm, Harper sees an escape hatch when a portfolio manager at the firm (Sarah Goldberg) leaves to start an explicitly anti-ESG firm that will focus on old-school market fundamentals. Harper’s friend and sometimes-nemesis Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) remains at Pierpoint and serves as a reminder that financial institutions are as strong as their weakest link. (It’s Yasmin who gets fooled into showing Harper a list of Pierpoint’s losing investments in ESG businesses.)
The whole Industry ensemble pokes and prods at the different sorts of people who populate the cutthroat financial world. Market-maker Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia) has a cool sports car and a beautiful wife and child, but he also has six figures in gambling debts, a bookie who’s just broken his arm offscreen, and an insatiable appetite for cocaine and women who aren’t his wife. Eric Tao (Ken Leung) is a newly minted Pierpoint partner who sees himself as a good friend and institutionalist but is happy to throw both a dear buddy and tradition to the wind when he has a chance to move up. Newcomer Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) is the in-over-his-head founder and CEO of the well-named “Lumi,” a green-energy startup that implodes on itself shortly after its initial public offering. He counts among his social circle the owner of a tabloid and a moderately branded Tory politician who uses the government hearing about Lumi’s demise to set up her eventual run for prime minister. Somewhere in all of this, Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) is the show’s one true good person—which, in this world, means he’s frequently taken advantage of by his employer, his clients, and the woman he loves most, Abela’s Yasmin. Robert follows Muck around and at one point gets into a furious wrestling match with Harington’s character over his ridiculous behavior. (Robert is the show’s version of the poor Tesla staffer who presumably has to ask Elon Musk to stop tweeting things that will get the company in trouble.)
Industry’s main focus isn’t financial machinations. It’s relationships, especially the one between Harper and Yasmin, two young women of opposite socioeconomics and market acumen. (Yasmin is a publishing heiress with little talent; Harper is a self-made market maven who can’t stop getting into trouble.) The financial industry is a set piece to explore those relationships. It is by no means Industry’s point.
But it’s also what the show does better than anything, and better than anything else on TV right now. Industry is a finance show that latches itself onto real-world stories and doesn’t rely on exposition or oversimplification to explain them. That makes some of the episodes a bit thick, but it also makes the show a fun puzzle for liberal-arts types and (one presumes) a neat window for people who work in money. Industry remains one of the only shows that wrote COVID into its plot not out of obligation, but because it was fruitful terrain for the subject matter. Season 2 arranged itself around pandemic stock trading, which turned out to be a nice way to explore the isolation of remote work, how professionals talk to each other about insurgent amateurs (“Reddit virgins,” as they’re called in the show), and the compromises that both idealists and craven careerists are willing to make in crunch time. (Financial crimes turn out to be one.)
In that ecosystem, Industry wants to be a show about the human condition and how we respond to incentives. But in the process, the series makes two salient points about money today. First, it’s easy to create a lot of value on a Bloomberg Terminal quickly, but it’s even easier to destroy it. Just take Pierpoint, the bank: One partner points out wistfully that it took “150 years to build it and a two-minute phone call to bring it all down.” Second, the people getting big salaries and bonuses to make a market mess aren’t always the savviest financial operators. (The most efficient financial mind in this season may in fact be the predatory bookie who repeatedly threatens the life of one of the characters.) Industry is the show willing to ask the question: If well-heeled banking execs can lose billions in a flash, why can’t you?
