Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 973.932 Taibbi | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Jefferson Public Library | 973.932 TAIBBI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 973.932 TAIBBI 2010 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The dramatic story behind the most audacious power grab in American history
The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn't past but prologue. The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class--made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding--has been growing in power for a generation, transferring wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms and political maneuvers. The crisis was only one terrifying manifestation of how they've hijacked America's political and economic life.
Rolling Stone' s Matt Taibbi here unravels the whole fiendish story, digging beyond the headlines to get into the deeper roots and wider implications of the rise of the grifters. He traces the movement's origins to the cult of Ayn Rand and her most influential--and possibly weirdest--acolyte, Alan Greenspan, and offers fresh reporting on the backroom deals that decided the winners and losers in the government bailouts. He uncovers the hidden commodities bubble that transferred billions of dollars to Wall Street while creating food shortages around the world, and he shows how finance dominates politics, from the story of investment bankers auctioning off America's infrastructure to an inside account of the high-stakes battle for health-care reform--a battle the true reformers lost. Finally, he tells the story of Goldman Sachs, the "vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity."
Taibbi has combined deep sources, trailblazing reportage, and provocative analysis to create the most lucid, emotionally galvanizing, and scathingly funny account yet written of the ongoing political and financial crisis in America. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the labyrinthine inner workings of politics and finance in this country, and the profound consequences for us all.
Author Notes
Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and a columnist for RollingStone.com. He is the author of The Great Derangement, Spanking the Donkey,Smells Like Dead Elephants, and The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Taibbi eviscerates Wall Street for what he considers frauds perpetrated on the American people over the last ten years. Deftly delving deeply into complicated financial history and lingo, Taibbi deftly lays the subject bare, rendering heretofore-dense subject matter simple without being simplistic. Blame for the recent mortgage collapse, commodities bubble, and tech bubble are laid at the feet of a relatively small number of bankers and traders who, in the author's opinion, act without fear of reciprocity from a U.S. government no longer representative of the American people. He begins by awarding the title "Biggest Asshole In The Universe" to former-Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, taking him to task for willfully or stupidly disemboweling what little regulation the financial markets may have had before his tenure. This theme resounds throughout, and Taibbi asserts that the collusion between Wall Street and the White House has effectively turned the United States into a massive casino, in which working Americans are regularly bilked out of their savings and homes while the wealthy are repeatedly rewarded for their graft. It's an important and worthy read, but not for the Randian disciple or Goldman-Sachs alum. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A ticked-off field guide to modern America, a place where the con artists of high finance call the shots."There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else," writesRolling Stonecorrespondent and frequent TV commentator Taibbi (The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, 2008, etc.). Given that almost everybody in that "everybody else" category knows nothing about how finance works, it's all too easy for the grifters to convince us that Wall Street is our friend and Washington our enemy. The author writes with populist fervor, but with the left-trending populism of an Upton Sinclair rather than a Father Coughlin. He has no use for the teabagger crowd or its prom queen, Sarah Palinwho, he writes, with memorable venom, "looks like a chief flight attendant on a Piedmont flight from Winston-Salem to Cleveland, with only the bag of almonds and the polyester kerchief missing from the picture." For all that, he does not discount the wrath that Palin and her cohorts express; even though it's misplaced, he writes, it's very real. Whether his patient explanations will ever reach that crowd remains to be seen, but Taibbi writes carefully about such things as the way that "gamblers disguised as Wall Street brokers" manipulate commodities to the exclusive benefit of the small capitalistgrifter, that isclass. The author writes with scorn for recent political maneuverings that amount to giveaways great and small to the con artists, not least of them the health-care reform package so despised by right-wingerswho, Taibbi adds, have ever since "disgraced themselves by spinning out one easily debunked lie after another" and otherwise behaving like infants.Meaty food for thought, steeped in righteous bile.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Rolling Stone contributing editor Taibbi delivers a blistering examination of the upheaval that has roiled the American economic system over the past several years. At the heart of the upheaval, he says, is a vein of greed running up and down the real-estate industry, from mortgage brokers who falsified customer loan applications to banks that parceled out mortgages to second and third parties to rating agencies that signed off on highly suspect loans. Taibbi saves a good deal of venom for former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, arguing that Greenspan's philosophy of easy cash, limited government oversight of markets, and bailing out too big to fail financial institutions all fueled the recent economic meltdown. And Taibbi profiles a recently passed health-care bill severely compromised by an all-powerful insurance lobby. As critical as he is of the process a process not likely to get fixed any time soon he doesn't seem to carry an agenda; instead, like any good investigative reporter, he mostly follows his nose.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMONG the unfortunate legacies of the financial crisis of 2008 is a tendency among commentators to soft-pedal the outrage over what happened. In too many accounts, blame is considered impossible to assign given the complexities of modern-day finance. Those inclined to point fingers at Wall Street or Washington are frequently derided as innocents who do not grasp how the world really works. The result is an apologia that goes something like this: Mistakes were made, despite the best intentions of financial professionals. Bankers lent too much money to poor people who never should have bought homes. Models used to measure risk broke down, and regulators were swamped. All of this was a shame, but accidents are a part of life, and an unavoidable part of the swashbuckling style of capitalism that has enriched Americans for generations. Nonsense, Matt Taibbi says. In "Griftopia," a relentlessly disturbing, penetrating exploration of the root causes of the trauma that upended economic security in millions of American homes, Taibbi argues that what unfolded was far from accidental. Rather, the nation suffered the equivalent of a hostile takeover of key areas of its commercial life by investment banking houses, while regulators and members of Congress abdicated their responsibilities either because they were influenced by campaign cash or because they believed the fairy tale that unsupervised markets always work best. The result, Taibbi asserts, was a thieves' paradise - Griftopia. A contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, Taibbi is best known for the metaphor he hurled like a grenade at the Wall Street goliath Goldman Sachs, calling it "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." He amplifies that characterization here, pointing out that Goldman managed to collect billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds that were paid to American International Group (A.I.G.). Taibbi persuasively dismisses the argument that the financial crisis was caused by poor people with a taste for real estate, delineating how Wall Street eagerly handed out mortgages to anyone with a pulse, and then used the home loans as the material for a far more lucrative enterprise - the exotic investments known as derivatives. The derivatives market depended upon a steady supply of mortgages. But when too many of the bets went bad, Wall Street persuaded the Treasury to construct bailouts that Taibbi describes as a "labyrinthine financial sewage system designed to stick us all with the raw waste and pump clean water back to Wall Street." Much of this story is familiar. The shelves are full of books describing how Wall Street turned mortgage markets into a casino. Goldman's dealings with A.I.G. have been probed in the pages of this newspaper, among others. What Taibbi brings is a broader context and his trademark snarky prose. He has written a polemic, a fullscale indictment of Wall Street and Washington, one that sometimes veers toward ranting, yet serves as a needed antidote to the more even-tempered but fatuous accounts already available. In Taibbi's telling, contemporary finance has perverted markets that once served important functions, turning them into frontier-style betting parlors. Futures markets, for example, were created to allow farmers to hedge themselves against fluctuations in crop prices, and were traditionally regulated to prevent investors from amassing holdings large enough to manipulate prices. But over the last two decades, the federal government, at Wall Street's behest, pared down its rules, allowing speculators to dominate commodities markets. Wall Street then steered pension funds into commodities. This, Taibbi claims, was the real cause of the commodities bubble that sent oil prices soaring to ludicrous heights in the summer of 2008. And now, with many local authorities hurting for cash, Wall Street is increasingly brokering deals that turn municipal facilities like Chicago's parking meters into investment vehicles controlled by overseas governments - deals that Taibbi presents as a taxpayer rip-off. Some of this analysis is overheated. Taibbi portrays the sale of infrastructure to overseas buyers as nefarious on its face, without adequately explaining the supposed evils. He accepts the depiction of the Obama health care reform as "a new law that will radically remake the faces of both the federal government and the private economy, and also ratify the worst paranoid fears of both ends of the political spectrum." Never mind that much of the healthcare sector was already in government hands through Medicare and Medicaid. But he rightly decries the crudity of the deal through which private insurers were supplied new customers at government-protected prices. Taibbi is a skilled and often entertaining writer. He is determined to help the reader make sense of complex issues that frequently cloak political and economic power, and he adroitly demystifies much of the jargon that lards financial writing. But he is too enamored of his own style. His prose wrestles for attention with the story itself, and his predilection for shock imagery and profanity tends to undermine the points he is trying to make. The vampire squid metaphor was deadly, yet Taibbi can't resist trying to duplicate that feat on just about every other page, as if laboring to justify his perch at the same magazine that once employed Hunter S. Thompson. Words and phrases like "bloviating," "utterly insane" and "moron" all get vigorous workouts. Taibbi refers to A.I.G.'s "impending ratings holocaust." And not content to excoriate the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan for his near-cultish reverence for unsupervised markets, Taibbi calls him a liar, adding that he "castrated the government as a regulatory authority, then transformed himsetf into the Pablo Escobar of high finance, unleashing a steady river of cheap weight into the crack house that Wall Street was rapidly becoming." Mixed metaphors aside, this sort of hyperventilation makes Taibbi's legitimate accusations seem flimsy, as if the facts alone were not sufficient cause for consternation. Taibbi reprints his now-famous vampire squid article as the book's final chapter (with updating), and then tacks on a tedious recounting of how other journalists unfairly attacked him. This score-settling comes off as sophomoric and trifling. STILL, Taibbi has written a necessary and engaging corrective to the noxious idea that the tragedy of recent years was an inevitable byproduct of the market system. What's more, he concludes with a grim warning. The villains of the last crisis, he observes, are the same people now tasked with preventing the next one."We live in an economy that is immensely complex, and we are completely at the mercy of the small group of people who understand it - who incidentally often happen to be the same people who built these wildly complex economic systems," he writes. "We have to trust these people to do the right thing, but we can't, because, well, they're scum. Which is kind of a big problem, when you think about it." The nation, Taibbi says, suffered the equivalent of a hostile takeover by investment banking houses. Peter S. Goodman is the business editor of The Huffington Post and the author of "Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy."
Library Journal Review
Rolling Stone contributing editor Taibbi argues that politics in America largely functions as entertainment, while shortsighted economic policies hugely benefit only a minority of individuals and businesses. Chapters on the mortgage crisis, the commodities bubble, and health-care reform are excellent, but he doesn't mince words. Only suggest this book to readers who will be able to handle Alan Greenspan being called a "one-in-a-billion asshole." (LJ 11/15/10) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
1 The Grifter Archipelago; or, Why the Tea Party Doesn't Matter | p. 3 |
2 The Biggest Asshole in the Universe | p. 35 |
3 Hot Potato: The Great American Mortgage Scam | p. 78 |
4 Blowout: The Commodities Bubble | p. 124 |
5 The Outsourced Highway: Wealth Funds | p. 156 |
6 The Trillion-Dollar Band-Aid: Health Care Reform | p. 173 |
7 The Great American Bubble Machine | p. 206 |
Epilogue | p. 241 |
Note on Sources | p. 251 |