I just finished Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, and I highly recommend it. It is an excellent account of the scam artistry that destroyed the economy, and is, like the vampire squid to which he compares Goldman Sachs, (the arch, but not only villain of the book) sucking the life blood out of the country. It’s a more readable and less circumspect version of the recently released Financial Commission report, leavened with humor, most of it dark.
A short synopsis: This country is controlled by Wall Street traders, who have no allegiance to anything other than their own personal gain. They are systematically siphoning money from the American economy into their own non-productive pockets, with the help of politicians who are more than satisfied with crumbs off the table, aided by a corporate media that diverts the attention of the mass of easily deluded Americans away from the oligarchy that is controlling the country and toward socially divisive trivialities, all while they are hollowing out the country by selling off its assets to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Even shorter synopsis: this country is toast, burnt to a crisp by Wall Street.
Well, you probably knew all that, but the book is still worth reading, since he sets it all out in a highly readable fashion.
Speaking of the financial crisis, it at least appears as if it will be harder to make the “no one could have seen this coming” defense the inevitable next time it happens. As the Times’ Gretchen Morgenstern observed this morning, in discussing the Commission’s report:
Yet the report still makes for compelling reading because so little has changed as a result of the debacle, in both banking and in its regulation. Providing chapter and verse, for example, on the bumbling and siloed management at the nation’s largest banks is enlightening, in that many of these institutions are even bigger than they were before. With too-big-to-fail institutions now larger than ever, we are almost certain to go through another episode like 2008 in the not-too-distant future.
This has become almost conventional wisdom, though amnesia may set in soon. Still, even while the memory and the realization are fresh, we do nothing, which proves yet again who is really pulling the strings.
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