This is an extraordinary book, combining gifted insights and turns of phrase with serious research that has a point worth fighting for: Wall Street led by Goldman Sachs has ripped off the entire US economy, and they still have most people thinking that politics matters.
The author is especially deft at observing, documenting, and describing the combination of lunatic ignorance and blessed righteous anger within the Tea Party, at the same time that he points out they have no idea that they have been funded and directed by the very people who have stolen their economy out from under them.
QUOTE (53): That’s why Alan Greenspan is the key to understanding this generation’s financial disaster. He repeatedly used the financial might of the state to jet-fuel the insanely regressive pyramid scheme of the bubble economy [led by Goldman Sachs], which like actual casioons proved to be a highly efficient method for converting the scattered savings of legions of individual schmuck-citizens into the concentrated holdings of a few private individuals.
I am educated by this book in that while I have understood for some time the role played by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) and his 99 sleazy Senatorial colleagues all too eager to approve 200 pages of deregulation legislation written by lobbyists and
inserted five minutes before the vote, I was not aware of the Greenspan-Rubin actions that set the stage to undermine, sidestep, and eventually dismiss the
Glass-Steagall Act that kept insurance, investment, and banking houses from merging.
A long chapter, the chapter on Greenspan is devastating, and concludes that Greenspan was in fact a master criminal, that the Greenspan era was not an era of economics run amok, but rather of organized crime running precisely as planned–
The middle part of the book is a tremendously detailed and well-told tale of how Goldman Sachs and a handful of other companies are nothing more than a criminal network that sucks as much credit from a range of targets as possible, and then burns them to the ground to collect the insurance (or “bailout” in today’s parlance). In two chapters, one on the mortgage scams including outright fraud at every step of the way by Moody’s and others, the other on the commodities bubble that led to rising gasoline prices and food security issues and food riots world-wide, all for the financial benefit of a small group in New York, the middle of the book assures this book’s place in the reference shelves of anyone hoping to excel in leveraged businesses in the future. A third chapter describes in detail about how foreign wealth funds are being encouraged to buy up US infrastructure including toll roads and parking meters, while the US brokers cheat the US sellers by underpricing everything. This is truly a tale of infamy and treason across the board.
The final chapter is a fuller version of the original Rolling Stone article that created a firestorm and destroyed “The Narrative” about Goldman making money on brilliance instead of crime. The author is blunt: Goldman Sachs is a “pump and dump” criminal operation, and the author notes with sadness that organized crime will always overcome disorganized democracy, at least as things now stand with asymmetric information and data pathologies (the latter my special interest). I had to read this chapter twice, and while the entire book is superb, this is the chapter I would scan, pdf, and translate into at least 33 languages and all twelve dialects of Arabic.
Bloomberg’s Tom Keene interviewed former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan at length yesterday. Greenspan commented on a wide range of topics beginning with a discussion of the political process. Greenspan’s main point was compromise is implicit in a democratic society.
at Amazon.com have been extremely favorable and it sounds like Taibbi expands on his original skewering of Goldman Sachs.
Alan Greenspan Believes Stocks are Cheap if Earnings Continue to Rise
by Barron Maestro on January 11, 2011
In The Wall Street Journal’s The Big Interview with Kelly Evans, Alan Greenspan talks at length about his view on the economy and stock market. He also says he wouldn’t have done anything different given what he knows now.
SMA Comment: I’m reading Matt Taibbi’s “Griftopia
,” specifically the chapter entitled “The Biggest Asshole in the Universe.” Evan’s excellent interview does nothing to dispel Taibbi’s assessment of “The Maestro.” Kelly Evans is supposedly only 23 years old and was the most impressive thing in this interview, although we can only hope we have the same lucidity of Greenspan when we’re 84.
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