Griftopia Quotes

“This is part of the reason that the AIG bailout is so troubling: when at least $13 billion worth of taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, some of that money was doubtless going to cover the bets Goldman had made against the stuff the bank itself was selling to old people and cities and states. In other words, Goldman made out on the housing bubble twice: it fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“The notion of “long-term greedy” vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“I believe now that there’s real fear of what happens once The Narrative blows up—because once we’ve ripped the rich to shreds, what we’re left with is a whole bunch of broke people wondering where the hell their money went, without even a soothing fairy tale to help them get to sleep at night.

People in the financial community who actually worked in that world, the traders and the bankers themselves who joked with me about “those motherfuckers,” did not have these illusions. You’re not going to be good at making money if you need there to be a halo around the moneymaking process. The only people who really clung to those illusions were the financial commentators, right up to the point where those illusions became completely unsustainable.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“...one of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own “revolutionary” defiance. It’s this psychic weakness that allows this segment of the population to be manipulated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. The advantage is that their willingness to take orders has allowed them to organize effectively (try getting one hundred progressives at a meeting focused on anything). The downside is, they see absolutely nothing weird in launching a revolution based upon the ravings of a guy who’s basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“So no one was surprised that they didn't make admissions; that would have been tantamount to surrendering in the lawsuit. But it was the tone that startled most people. If your wife catches you with another woman, every man knows, even if you're not sorry, you have to act sorry. You can't just stare back at her and say, "I don't get what you're so upset about."

And that's exactly how the Goldman executives behaved. It wasn't so much that they lied, it was that they seemed to think they were telling the truth. They seemed to really believe they were right.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Banks like Goldman remain largely shielded from the impact of public opinion because while the public’s only link to power is through the clumsy and highly imperfect avenue of elections, a bank of this size has a whole network of intimate connections with direct access to policy. In”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Greenspan’s rise is instead a tale of a gerbilish mirror-gazer who flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attentions of Wall Street for twenty consecutive years—in the process laying the intellectual foundation for a generation of orgiastic greed and overconsumption and turning the Federal Reserve into a permanent bailout mechanism for the super-rich.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Just looking at Palin up on the podium doesn’t impress me. She 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. With”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“The powers that be don’t want people thinking about any of these things. If the people must politick, then let them do it in the proper arena, in elections between Wall Street–sponsored Democrats and Wall Street–sponsored Republicans. They want half the country lined up like the Tea Partiers against overweening government power, and the other half, the Huffington Post crowd, railing against corporate excess. But don’t let the two sides start thinking about the bigger picture and wondering if the real problem might be a combination of the two.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Goldman is not a company of geniuses, it’s a company of criminals. And far from being the best fruit of a democratic, capitalist society, it’s the apotheosis of the Grifter Era, a parasitic enterprise that has attached itself to the American government and taxpayer and shamelessly engorged itself on us all.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Americans spend an average of about $7,200 a year on health care, compared with the roughly $2,900 average for the other market economies that make up the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and for that greatly increased outlay we get higher infant mortality, higher obesity rates, lower longevity, fewer doctors per 1,000 people (just 2.4 per 1,000 in the United States, compared with 3.1 in OECD states), and fewer acute care hospital beds (2.7 per 1,000, compared to 3.8 per 1,000 in the OECD countries).”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“The epic struggle to pass health care reform was at once a shameless betrayal of the public trust of historic proportions and proof that a nation that perceives itself as being divided into red and blue should start paying attention to a third color that rules the day in Washington—a sort of puke-colored politics that puts together deals like this one and succeeds largely through its mastery of the capital city’s bureaucracy.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“The explosion of energy prices—thanks to a bubble that Western banks and perhaps some foreign SWFs had a big hand in creating—led to Americans everywhere feeling increased financial strain. Tax revenue went down in virtually every state in the country. In fact, the correlation between the rising prices from the commodities bubble and declining tax revenues is remarkable. According to the Rockefeller Institute, which tracks state revenue collection, the rate of growth for state taxes hit its lowest point in five years in the first quarter of 2008, which is when oil began its surge from around $75 to $149 a barrel.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“The amount of new lending was mind-boggling: between 2003 and 2005, outstanding mortgage debt in America grew by $3.7 trillion, which was roughly equal to the entire value of all American real estate in the year 1990 ($3.8 trillion). In other words, Americans in just two years had borrowed the equivalent of two hundred years’ worth of savings.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“The presidential election is a drama that we Americans have learned to wholly consume as entertainment, divorced completely from any expectations about concrete changes in our own lives.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Say Bank A is holding $10 million in A-minus-rated IBM bonds. It goes to Bank B and makes a deal: we’ll pay you $50,000 a year for five years and in exchange, you agree to pay us $10 million if IBM defaults sometime in the next five years—which of course it won’t, since IBM never defaults.

If Bank B agrees, Bank A can then go to the Basel regulators and say, “Hey, we’re insured if something goes wrong with our IBM holdings. So don’t count that as money we have at risk. Let us lend a higher percentage of our capital, now that we’re insured.” It’s a win-win. Bank B makes, basically, a free $250,000. Bank A, meanwhile, gets to lend out another few million more dollars, since its $10 million in IBM bonds is no longer counted as at-risk capital.

That was the way it was supposed to work. But two developments helped turn the CDS from a semisensible way for banks to insure themselves against risk into an explosive tool for turbo leverage across the planet.

One is that no regulations were created to make sure that at least one of the two parties in the CDS had some kind of stake in the underlying bond. The so-called naked default swap allowed Bank A to take out insurance with Bank B not only on its own IBM holdings, but on, say, the soon-to-be-worthless America Online stock Bank X has in its portfolio. This is sort of like allowing people to buy life insurance on total strangers with late-stage lung cancer—total insanity.

The other factor was that there were no regulations that dictated that Bank B had to have any money at all before it offered to sell this CDS insurance.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“It’s hard to overstate how utterly mad it is for a Fed chairman in the age of the global economy to claim that a weak currency only affects tourists. It’s a little bit like saying a forest fire only really sucks if you’re a woodpecker.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Voters who throw their emotional weight into elections they know deep down inside won’t produce real change in their lives are also indulging in a kind of fantasy. That’s why voters still dream of politicians whose primary goal is to effectively govern and maintain a thriving first world society with great international ambitions. What voters don’t realize, or don’t want to realize, is that that dream was abandoned long ago by this country’s leaders, who know the more prosaic reality and are looking beyond the fantasy, into the future, at an America plummeted into third world status.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“were used (or misused) is the difference between”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America