Watch Abacus: Small Enough to Jail For Free

Overrated and overhyped

Great Film overall

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This documentary had me fuming. The Too Big to Fail Banks got off scot-free, and actually made money from the crisis they created. Meanwhile, a bank catering to a migrant community, who tries to do the right thing gets screwed by an overzealous, politically motivated DA.

Documentary that doubles as a hagiography of a family of directors of a small Chinatown bank chain as they are brought up on mortgage fraud charges for wholesale fabrication of mortgage banking records sold on to Fannie Mae. They are proposed to be the victims of awful low level employee loan officers who fabricated and extorted the clients whose records they helped fabricate. What it actually shows is a family of shady bank directors who successfully firewalled themselves (take a page from Stevie Cohen!) from criminal guilt. Congratulations. A systemic problem that large wasn't found because they didn't want it found. There's a few words about tax fraud in this film but the subject passes by quickly. Make no mistake though, that is the scam going on here. The default rates on these loans was so low because the applicants actually made much more money and/or had assets that they never paid taxes on. Possibly kept in the Abacus Bank security deposit vaults shown early in the film. The gift note is mentioned prominently in the film, a note where a relative or person connected to the borrower promises a money transfer and this promissory note is then added to the mortgage file. If the makers of this film were really interested in what actually was happening at Abacus, a fascinating thing to do would have been to try and find the authors of these notes. I suspect they wouldn't find many, and that most of these promissory notes were to cover for mortgage applicants pulling their own unreported money out of whatever bolthole they had it shoved into.Was the prosecution and dog and pony show of dragging people in chains worth it? In hindsight, probably not, but that doesn't change the amount of shade going on at Abacus.

This documentary shows you how politically motivated are the justice system. Rather than picking on banks that defrauded American trillions of dollars, they choose to indict a small family bank in Chinatown. T's disgusting when you understand the scope of what the mortgage crisis did to America and not surprising that the only ones prosecuted were Chinese-American.The DAs in this film looks like pompous legal heavy hitter-wannabes tainted by self-righteous vain-glories.

UNBELIEVABLE! I have never written a review but feel compelled to by the emotional response and anger this documentary has stirred. It is a well-done documentary, and I guess I am just shocked by its content. I have studied the 2008 financial crisis extensively. I had no idea this happened. The US government and the New York DA's office should be absolutely ashamed. The fact that this happened makes me disappointed in my government. Part of me is holding some hope that the documentary is extremely biased and one sided (though I do not believe this is true). It makes me physically ill to think that the large financial institutions such as Citi Group, Bank of America, JP Morgan, etc., got away with what they did in causing the financial crisis and our government spent its resources persecuting this small family run community bank. Unbelievable.