matt taibbi

Given that today is Friday, the NFL pre-season is underway, and I had a little bit to drink last night, I thought I'd pose an existential question today. If you had a choice, would you rather be a professional athlete or an investment banker? I know it sounds a little off-the-wall, but indulge me. I was inspired by the latest article by Matt Taibbi (yes, that Matt Taibbi. Settle down; he leaves Goldman alone in this one.)

Plenty of bankers, and even more traders, come from the ranks of college athletes. And it takes a hell of a lot to compete at the collegiate level. So I know there's a wide cross-section of Wall Street who has at least thought about what it would be like to be a professional athlete. If we're being honest, we've all thought about it a few times. And you don't have to be a train wreck like Lenny Dykstra.

Gird your loins; Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is on the warpath again. This time he's detailing the various methods used to generate massive profits and bonus numbers at the expense of the taxpayer, and it's a ripping good read. Grab a cup of coffee, swallow some Vicodin, and then click HERE.

He starts with a pretty predictable riff on Goldman Sachs and Lloyd Blankfein, but everyone on the Street has to admit that the firm makes no discernible effort to improve their image. Where the article gets interesting is when he begins to outline the different scams used to take advantage of the (ludicrous) rescue measures put in place by the government and he does so in the appropriate con artist lingo.

That is the inescapable conclusion Matt Taibbi reaches in his latest Rolling Stone article, "Obama's Big Sellout". While this article definitely won't have the impact of his Vampire Squid expose of Goldman Sachs, it will nonetheless rattle some cages.

Taibbi makes the point that Obama ran, and was elected, on a progressive populist platform. His economic advisers on the campaign trail included Austan Goolsbee (a University of Chicago econ professor) and Karen Kornbluh (policy adviser and party wonk), both well known liberals advising Obama to crack down on Wall Street. The day after he was elected, Goolsbee and Kornbluh were sent packing and an economic team incestuously connected to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was brought in to take the reins.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone's financial reporter, has pointed his guns at Barack Obama in a new investigative piece, titled "Obama's Big Sellout." As you might have gleaned from the headline, the piece is not about a White House yard sale, but the President's collusive dealings with big, bad Wall Street.

Taibbi, a master conspiracy theorist who has yet to figure out he works for a music magazine, accuses the President of running as a progressive and then getting into bed with bankers. Sounds like quite a few women I've dated. He also maintains that the financial reform bill making its way through congress will give the White House control of all future bailouts, taking that power away from congress and making Wall Street more dependent on taxpayers.

Here's a glimpse:

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.