Matt Taibbi, Sam Seder on Alex Pareene Popping CNBC's Bubble

http://youtu.be/EuXf9GmQln4

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

To all my critics who insisted I was a conspiracy theorist, here's a big $hit sandwich just for you. 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425?print=true

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

Matt Taibbi: Election Jamie Dimon To Be Treasury Secretary Would Be 'Revolution-Provoking Decision'

Thanks to Kitty for finding this one.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/matt-taibbi-jamie-dimon-treasury-secretary_n_2210871.html

Accidentally Released - and Incredibly Embarrassing - Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in 'Naked Short Selling'

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-20120515

The Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin Gives Goldman a Rubdown

Matt Taibbi 1, Andrew Ross Sorkin 0.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/andrew-ross-sorkin-gives-goldman-a-rubdown-20110607

A bit of advice for Taibbi.  You might want to check under your car every morning.  You're not making friends on Wall Street.  Keep up the good work.

Too Big to Jail

Thanks to an unnamed good friend (for his/her own protection) who found this snippet on CNN.

At least Goldman Sachs shill Megan McArdle admits she didn't read the report, ergo she is eminently qualified to comment on it.  Not.  "These cases are incredibly difficult to bring and win..." is a legitimate reason to not prosecute them?  What a friggen' joke of a print journalist.  So Megan, how much did you get paid for your incredibly ignorant, er...insightful comments?  Obviously, none of it was used for a make-over.

As for Matt Taibbi's landmark exposes on The Vampire Squid, I would be increasing his life insurance coverage if I were him.  Let's hope he doesn't end up in some mysterious "accident".  He's one of the truly courageous investigative journalists left.

Matt Taibbi's Latest: " Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail?"

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216?page=1

Matt Taibbi on Goldman

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/;kw=[3351,136554]?RS_show_page=0

Many of us have read Taibbi's hard-hitting articles on Wall Street's fraudsters. But what intrigued me the most were his anecdotal comments on Wall Street's other crimes-in-progress.

http://www.gata.org/node/8591

"There is more fraud out there, and everyone knows it: front-running, manipulation of the commodities markets, trading ahead of interest-rate moves, hidden losses, Enron-esque accounting, Ponzi schemes in the precious-metals markets, you name it. We gave these people nearly a trillion bailout dollars, and no one knows what service they actually provide beyond fraud, gross self-indulgence and the occasional transparently insincere public apology."

[ed. bold emphasis is mine]

When and if the story on precious metals price suppression breaks, the emperor will be exposed as naked, in more ways than one.

Looting Main Street, by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi wrote a scathing account in Rolling Stone of how Goldman Sachs fleeced clients--including sovereign governments like Greece, while at the same time, gerrymandering a bailout to save their bacon when their bets turned sour. See that article here. Taibbi now turns his attention to JPMorgan, and how they looted local governments here in the good ol' USA.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street/1

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

Wall Street hustle

This is an excellent article by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi on how "banks too big to fail" and our government are raping and pillaging its tax-paying citizens. It's long, but it's a MUST READ.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/1

Robert Rubin on the economy

Wow, Robert Rubin finally speaks, after stepping down from his perch at Citigroup. According to a few independent thinkers, Rubin was one of the main instigators in the cause of the financial and economic crises we find ourselves in. The former Treasury Secretary formerly headed up Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, encouraging banks to leverage up their balance sheets to increase dubious earnings via the use of derivatives, which ended up being toxic assets. We all know how that drunken party turned out.

His progeny in the ensuing bank bailouts include former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (also, formerly of Goldman Sachs), top Obama financial advisor Lawrence Summers, and current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, among other well-placed government bureaucrats and bankers.

The editorial actually gives fair warning to the approaching storm, even if it lacks any mea culpa for past misdeeds. I guess omission is a form of honesty.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/225623/page/1

First, there must be sound fiscal and monetary policies. The United States faces projected 10-year federal budget deficits that seriously threaten its bond market, exchange rate, economy, and the economic future of every American worker and family. Those risks are exacerbated by the context of those deficits: a low household-savings rate, even after recent increases; large funding requirements for federal debt maturities every year; heavy overweighting of dollar-denominated assets in foreign portfolios; worsened fiscal prospects in the decades after the current 10-year budget period; and competing claims for capital to fund deficits in other countries.

The conventional concern here is that private investment will be crowded out, which would result in a reduction of productivity, competitiveness, and growth. In addition, the very early 1990s showed that unsound fiscal conditions can have a symbolic effect that broadly undermines business and consumer confidence. But finally, and far more dangerously, our bond and currency markets could react with severe distress to fears about imbalances in the supply and demand for capital in the years ahead or about the possibilities of inflation. Those effects have been averted so far by a number of factors: large inflows of capital from abroad into Treasury securities; concerns about other major currencies; the low level of private demand for capital; and the psychological state of the market. But this cannot continue indefinitely, and change can occur with great force—and unpredictable timing.

Read Matt Taibbi's scathing article on Obama's big sellout and the pandering to big Wall Street bankers--at the expense and hoodwinking of tax payers. Robert Rubin is a central figure in the web of lies, deception, and pilfering.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout