You could write a screenplay about the great financial crash. It has all the right ingredients: wealth, power, panic, bankruptcy and the whiff of corruption and a good movie is a fitting American tribute to an American disaster. Story factories in Hollywood will be hard at work, stitching together a script for the blockbuster: is it The Fall of the House of Lehman or The Day the Money Ran Out.

The difficulty will be in compressing sprawling events into a manageable story. Is it a Tinseltown tale about the struggle for justice? Bad financiers steal the money, leaving families homeless. The ogres in suits (cue Michael Douglas in a reprisal of Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's Wall Street as a short-selling hedge fund manager) are then crushed by the mad money machine they created. We learn that greed is not good and selfish people get their just deserts.

Might it run better as a disaster movie? It's a grumbling volcano, the telltale tremors ignored by Wall Street's finest until the monster blows its top. Only one man, a brilliant and eccentric derivatives analyst (played by Jeff Goldblum) in the back room of a brokerage, understands the impending catastrophe. Ridiculed for his prophecies of doom and facing the sack, he convinces his girlfriend, who works in the Federal Reserve in Washington, to give him one last chance: two minutes with Ben Bernanke. The Fed chairman listens and calls the President. The world's greatest financial rescue - $700 billion - is arranged and America is saved. But neither scenario is satisfactory, never mind plausible. It's not that the plots are absurd, but that they fail to get to grips with the real horror of this financial meltdown.

In Hollywood's Judaeo-Christian mindset, stories must have a resolution, a making good. Learned men find solutions or justice is brought to bear. Bad things happen because we lack knowledge or because people misbehave. Good rules can solve the problem. It is a powerful idea that explains the American obsession with regulation. A legion of US lawyers will soon attempt to draft rules to prevent people doing bad things with money.

But this crash isn't caused by injustice or lack of knowledge. It's about the mad dash of believers, helter-skelter down the road to hell. It's like a volcano or tidal wave, except that it is man-made and no less inexorable. If people had behaved differently, with more caution, it might have been averted. But they did not. In flagrant disregard of history, the banks proclaimed that all was well, that house prices would continue to climb, that money would remain cheap and share prices rise. We all borrowed and lived extravagantly.

The Ancient Greeks believed that the gods punished arrogance and they wrote tragedies to remind us that we are playthings of jealous, malign divinities. These are not comforting fairytales in which villains are punished and good guys get the money and the girl. Greek tragedies are warnings. Sophocles' Oedipus, a new version of which is now on at the National Theatre in London, is a compelling but hideous spectacle. There is no justice and no redemption for the hero, only punishment.

Oedipus searches frantically for evidence to disprove the Oracle's ghastly prophecy that he will murder his father and have sex with his mother. For the audience, the emotion conjured up is not pity or outrage but visceral fear. We know that Apollo will have him, writhing in agony; it is just a matter of time.

This doesn't play well in Hollywood, and not just because studios favour happy endings. Stories that dispense with fairness make us uncomfortable. We like to believe that we are rational materialists who look for scientific solutions. Were a plague of stillborn children to be visited upon a contemporary city of Thebes, we should look for answers under a microscope, not worry about celestial vengeance.

But there is something disquieting and pagan about this unravelling financial disaster. Brainy people borrowed too much, choosing to believe that the value of a house could rise beyond affordability. Such blind belief in asset values is the faith that underpins our global economy. If we stopped believing that share prices would continue to rise, we would never invest.

If people in the eastern Mediterranean 10,000 years ago had doubted that the rains would come in the right month, they would never have planted seed. Financial markets are a gigantic extension of the farmer's gamble. It rained last year, it will rain this year.

On reflection, the crash would not make a good movie. It would bomb in Chicago, where the mood is more about celebrating the new Messiah than sacrificing goats to appease capricious deities. If we made such a movie it would be about the year when the rains failed, drought scorched the land and it was no one's fault. And the rains failed again the following year and the year after that. It's a movie that we don't want to see.

Carl Mortished is world business editor of The Times

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