by Helen Tansey
January 25, 2012
One can’t help but be suspicious about the timing of Lanny Breuer’s, Assistant Attorney General for DOJ’s Criminal Division, recent decision to step down. Breuer was responsible for holding accountable the TBTF banking thieves who singlehandedly imploded America’s economy not to mention the rest of the global economy in 2008. [Read more…]
June 21, 2012
By Matt Taibbi
Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. [Read more…]
Read author Simon Johnson’s review of Ferguson’s “Predator Nation” [Read more…]
by Paul Craig Roberts
This essay is about three recent books that explain how we lost our economy, the Constitution and our civil liberties, and how peace lost out to war.
Matt Taibbi is the best — certainly the most entertaining — financial/political reporter in the country. There is no better book than Griftopia (2010) to which to turn to understand how stupidity, greed, and criminality, spread evenly among policymakers and Wall Street, created the financial crisis that has left Americans overburdened with both private and public debt. Taibbi walks the reader through the fraudulent financial instruments that littered the American, British, and European financial communities with toxic waste. He has figured it all out, and what in other hands might be an arcane account for MBAs is, in Taibbi’s hands, a highly readable and entertaining story.
For the first 65 pages, Taibbi entertains the reader with the inability of the public and politicians to focus on any reality. The financial story begins on page 65 with Fed chairman Alan Greenspan undermining the Glass-Steagall Act leading to its repeal by three political stooges, Gramm-Leach-Bliley. This set the stage for the banksters to leverage debt upon debt until the house of cards collapsed. When Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, attempted to do her regulatory job and regulate derivatives, the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Securities and Exchange Commission got her bounced out of office. To make certain that no other regulator could protect the financial system and its participants from what was coming, Congress deregulated the derivatives markets by passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. [Read more…]