It’s long been suspected that ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s helped trigger the meltdown. A new trove of embarrassing documents shows how they did it.
February 14, 2013
Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail ~ How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it…
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
By Matt Taibbi
February 14, 2013 8:00 AM ET
The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, [Read more…]
September 4, 2012
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
By Matt Taibbi
August 29, 2012 7:00 AM ET
Illustration by Robert Grossman
The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn’t stand for anything. He’s a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who’ll say anything to get elected.
The critics couldn’t be more wrong. [Read more…]
June 21, 2012
The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia
How America’s biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy – until they were caught on tape
June 21, 2012
By Matt Taibbi
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
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…]
August 23, 2011
Covering Up Wall Street Crimes: Matt Taibbi Exposes How SEC Shredded Thousands of Investigations
In case you missed Taibbi’s report, here it is Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?
A whistle-blower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals.
More interviews available at DemocracyNow!
August 19, 2011
10 Lobbyists per Member of Congress Fighting Effective Finance Regulations
First, read this expose by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote earlier this week about how regulators at the SEC destroyed thousands of records thereby impeding investigations into these obvious crimes –
Then take a minute to read this article about how the lobbyists from the big firms have already paid $11.2 million and counting for access and influence to the new UNCONSTITUTIONAL Congressional Super Committee –
Wall Street firms donated $11.2 million to members of debt ‘super committee’
And lastly, if the above two articles haven’t convinced you of the sickening buy off of your members of congress to look out for you and your pocketbook, well, read this little ditty how a former VP w/Goldman Sachs literally changed his name to work for Congressman Darrell Issa –
May 20, 2011
RT – Taibbi: 'U.S. politics – reality show sponsored by Wall Street'
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hpMEPYzdJ8
By Matt Taibbi
May 11, 2011 9:30 AM ET
They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.
Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.
Read the rest of Taibbi’s article at Rolling Stone by clicking HERE
April 13, 2011
Keiser Report: Banking XXX and The Real Housewives of Wall Street by Matt Taibbi
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3NdUU1wWa4
March 4, 2011
The Perfidy of Government: Evidence v. Denial
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…]
February 23, 2011
Democracy Now! Amy Goodman interviews Matt Taibbi on "Why isn't Wall Street in Jail?"
Rolling Stone – “Why isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”
by Matt Taibbi
February 16, 2011 9:00 AM ET
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
I put down my notebook. “Just that?”
“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.
Read the full story HERE
April 21, 2010
Rolling Stone: by Matt Taibbi, The Great American Bubble Machine Part 1/5
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXfTleqKr-U&feature=player_embedded
Part 2
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5dKmBB2rlo&feature=related
Part 3
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DObBtnVA0g&feature=related
Part 4
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlKzSin51eA&feature=related
Part 5
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpFXAPcS-D0&feature=related