It’s this final installment, directed by the Oscar-winning documentarian Fisher Stevens (The Cove), that will probably draw the most eyeballs, and to Stevens’s credit, he’s drawn a thorough and engaging work from a subject that’s been exhaustively reported on. But the series, executive produced by Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), is distinguished by the way it crafts a larger message about unfettered capitalism out of all of its infuriating, logic-defying stories. The creation of capital, Gibney argues in “Hard Nox,” his investigation into Volkswagen, is based on financial abstractions about risk and reward. There’s no space in the equation for moral considerations, only numbers.

Dirty Money proves its thesis not just by exposing corporations, but also by rendering thoughtful, intimate portraits of individuals whose desire to accumulate wealth has transformed into a terminal kind of myopia. “Payday,” directed by Jesse Moss, is an astonishing hour and eight minutes spent unpacking Scott Tucker, the race car driver who earlier this month was sentenced to 16 years in prison for operating an illegal payday-lending operation that hid behind Native American tribes and their sovereignty. Moss gets so much access to Tucker and his family that the episode opens as Tucker is furiously working out in his home gym while his cars are being impounded by federal agents. His wife is disgusted by the idea that someone else might buy them. She would never, she tells the camera, want “to be part of the process of the destruction of somebody’s life.”

It’s a sniffily moralistic statement for someone whose family wealth came from charging financially unstable Americans interest rates of, according to Dirty Money, as much as 500 percent. Moss builds “Payday” around these contrasts. He films the Tuckers as they attest their innocence and rail at the government for destroying their lives, but in the next scene he spends time with a trucker who was forced to take a payday loan to pay the gas bill so his kids wouldn’t freeze, and whose $500 loan led to almost three times that amount being deducted from his account. He incorporates recordings of furious borrowers calling operators to ask why their payments were so high, then films Tucker explaining that he’s really providing a public service. “No good deed goes unpunished,” Tucker—who made $400 million out of people in various stages of desperation—complains.

This personal self-delusion is manifested on a larger scale in the boardrooms of Volkswagen and HSBC. Gibney investigates how the former, on its mission to become the biggest automobile manufacturer in the world, created diesel cars that could cheat emissions tests while pumping 40 times more nitrogen oxide into the air than they claimed to. In “Cartel Bank,” Kristi Jacobson looks at how HSBC knowingly laundered almost a billion dollars for drug cartels and terrorist organizations. While Volkswagen ended up paying a $14.7 billion settlement and had several of its executives sentenced to jail time, it achieved its goal of dominating the global market. HSBC essentially got away with a slap on the wrist after prosecutors weighed the damage a more severe punishment might do to the economy—leading to the memorable conclusion in “Cartel Bank” that some companies are “too big to jail.”