Fraud on Wall Street?

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine’s financial reporter, Matt Taibbi, writes a story called “Wall Street’s Naked Swindle,” in which he claims that evidence suggests that there was massive manipulation (specifically a whole lot of naked short selling) that helped fuel the collapse of Lehman and Bear and that the Fed, SEC, etc. has not yet taken action against the cheating bastards.

In the article and in his blog, Taibbi also claims that Goldman may be partly responsible for the events of mid-March or, at the very least, culpable for deliberately spreading misinformation about naked short-selling in their lobbying efforts to congress.

Unfortunately, because Rolling Stone is still hanging on to the analog age like George Bush to revisionist history, the magazine has not yet posted the article on its website. But, here is a video of Taibbi talking to Old Patty “Crazy Talk” Buchanan as well as others.

Highlights include quotations like, “Does the ‘C’ in ‘SEC’ stand for ‘clueless’????”

Dealbook responded a couple of days ago with a fluff article on Taibbi's claims.

And for good measure, here’s the trailer to Michael Moore’s new movie. America’s “most feared film-maker” (according to his trailer) will no doubt conflate this issue and make a potentially interesting topic into a high-cholesterol crapcake. How has this guy not been tarred and feathered yet?

Does anyone think that Taibbi is on to something here?