Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com immediately responded to this attack on the movie with a riposte that will be expanded upon in this book: "This is worse than useless, since Klein incorrectly throws up his hands and effectively says no one can understand what happened and therefore there's no answer. One of the reasons the crisis has been so 'difficult to understand' is that the government and banking elites have been taking extraordinary efforts to obscure the truth. The AIG bailout, the GSE bailouts, the alphabet soup of Fed facilities, the con game of the 'stress tests,' the refusal to release information, the ridiculous government programs to 'restart' the market, the efforts to deny the mortgage crisis, HAMP, the ongoing efforts to prop up the banks even though they are insolvent, they are all massive efforts at obscuring what really happened and what is still going on. This is not a coincidence; it is a deliberate effort orchestrated by the banks, the Fed, and the Treasury."

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 1769