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    Griftopia: bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking America
    Unavailable
    Griftopia: bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking America
    Unavailable
    Griftopia: bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking America
    Ebook342 pages5 hours

    Griftopia: bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking America

    By Matt Taibbi

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The dramatic story behind the most audacious power grab in American history

    The global financial crisis isn’t past but prologue. The fall and rescue of Wall Street was the coming-out party for the looters at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class—made up of the largest players in finance and the politicians who do their bidding—has been growing in power for a generation, transferring wealth upward through complex financial and political manoeuvres. The crisis was one manifestation of how they’ve hijacked America’s political and economic life.

    Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi unravels the fiendish rise of the grifters. He traces the origins to the cult of Ayn Rand and her most influential—and possibly weirdest—acolyte, Alan Greenspan. He reveals backroom deals that decided the winners in the government bailouts; shows how finance dominates politics, from investment bankers auctioning off America’s infrastructure to the battle for healthcare reform; and tells the story of Goldman Sachs, a ‘vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’.

    Taibbi combines deep sources, trailblazing reportage, and provocative analysis to create the most lucid, emotionally galvanising, and scathingly funny account yet of the American political and financial crisis. It is essential reading in order to understand the inner workings of politics and finance in America, and the profound consequences for us all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribe Publications
    Release dateNov 22, 2010
    ISBN9781921753510
    Unavailable
    Griftopia: bubble machines, vampire squids, and the long con that is breaking America
    Author

    Matt Taibbi

    Matt Taibbi is a reporter for First Look Media. He has been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, and is the author of five previous books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Great Derangement and Griftopia. He lives in New Jersey.

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    Reviews for Griftopia

    4.5/5

    17 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Can we just nationalize the banks and prosecute the fraudsters already?!
    • 5/5
      I don't have a lot to add to what some other's have written about this book. Having lived through these financial events and experienced the frustration, as a working stiff, of seeing mega-assholes fuck up the economy then get bailed out by the taxpayer, it is nice to find a writer who actually CALLS them assholes.

      Yes, that is kind of a petty way to feel, but I'm good with it.
    • 5/5
      This is the 6th book I've read about the recent financial catastrophes.

      Fools Gold, The End of Wall Street, The Big Short, How Markets Fail, All the Devils Are Here are all worthy books, but Griftopia tops the rest with its insights and outrage.

      Taibbi doesn't simply settle for exposition and analysis. He's angry that business (Wall Street, insurance industry in particular) abetted by our government has robbed us blind while citizens have amused themselves with a media circus that doesn't investigate or analyze anything but rather creates endless cheap Punch & Judy shows featuring mindless, clowns wearing business attire variously speaking in measured tones or spouting pointless vitriol.

      Taibbi is the Hunter Thompson of our time, but an improved version who does his homework and shows us where all the bodies have been buried.

      Watch the documentary Inside Job and then read Griftopia
    • 5/5
      Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking Americaby Matt TaibbiI read this book a long time ago but it is still relevant today. The book is not about you or me but about the con men and women behind the scenes. (Well, some are right there in our faces just lying to us!)This book covers the right, left, and everyone in between. No one is left out. The many ways people have had the screws put to us and gotten away with it. The author pulls no punches!He makes even the most complex scams easy to understand.I forgot how good this book was! Definitely need to get one of his newer books!
    • 5/5
      To paraphrase Will Rogers, Taibbi explains the recent economic meltdown and bailout(s) in terms simple enough even an economist or banker can understand them. Although economists and bankers understand the new rules well enough; it's the rest of us who need to be brought up to speed as to how elite banks legally stole billions of dollars, and are continuing to get away with it.
    • 5/5
      Taibbi's first book, co-written with Mark Ames, went into hilarious, profane and excruciating detail on how a small cadre of "businessmen" walked away with millions, probably more like billions, of dollars worth of formerly state-owned assets, rigging auctions, strong-arming, whatever it took. The Exile is the story of the biggest thefts in recorded history, of the corrupt western consultants who let it happen, and of the foreign press corps who cheered it on in the guise of reporting on it. No punches were pulled in the writing of that book -- or in this new one.

      From calling out Alan Greenspan as "the world's biggest asshole" to presenting detailed analyses of the Internet, housing and commodities bubbles (the last of which being the real cause of recent hideous spikes in gasoline and food prices, after important regulatory safeguards were sidestepped with the Republicrats' blessing and speculators went buck wild in that market), Taibbi is an angry jackass in the public interest, but one who does his homework and gets his facts straight.

      It probably shouldn't be this much fun to read about how screwed we were and still are.
    • 4/5
      "Pointing at the sun while pissing on your shoes". A phrase from Ian MacDonald's Out On Blue Six to describe misdirection of the populace by the Powers That Be.My feeling is that all Americans, whatever their political persuasion, should read Griftopia. Even if you are going to divide Taibbi's assertions by three, and take a third of what he says as true, there is food for thought here, no matter which way your political compass points. This is not a knee-jerk reaction against "the rich" as such, nor is it a rant against "welfare queens". It also dismisses Rand-ian pseudo-philosophy. What he is trying to do here is to strip away the concept that Democrats are automatically "good" and Republicans are automatically "bad" or the other way round. And the libertarian alternative really is no alternative - what the USA needs is more regulation, not less, of big business.There is sympathy in this book for the legitimate gripes of both the left (such as it is in such a conservative country as the USA) and the right-leaning Tea Party - but what he is trying to do is to educate these groups, and swing their guns in what he sees as the right direction - the Wall Street bankers, and the government that they have bought and paid for.The simple description of how Chicago car-owners have been betrayed by the city government, who sold off the parking meters and revenue from them to an Abu Dhabi-backed consortium through a layer of shell companies, who promptly proceeded to gouge the citizens, would have caused riots and possible revolution if it had been reported in the mass media.As it is, I become more and more convinced that no US administration will ever repeal or change the 2nd Amendment - it's a sop thrown to the American sheeple to give them the illusion that they are free. In all other aspects, they are slaves to a few large parasitic corporations which don't even produce anything of value. "Vampire squid" is a very kind term for them.
    • 4/5
      I am powerfully drawn to Taibbi’s writing, but I can only read so much at a time before his and my rage threaten to overwhelm me. Also, warning: I can’t overemphasize just how often he uses disability-related words to signify stupidity, evil, or general unworthiness as a human being. Nonetheless, I can’t stay away from a guy in the relatively mainstream media who is this angry about our current situation, and willing to call out specific people. He suggests that Tea Partiers have legitimate grievances about overintrusive local government, and have wrongly generalized that (with substantial assistance from powerful people with every incentive to help them do so), assuming that the government is to Wall Street what it is to Main Street rather than being a handmaiden of looting. But what actually happened and is still happening is complicated, and anti-intellectualism is a brilliant strategy because the Tea Party is “arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.” He makes a go of it, covering mortgage securitization (and initiation fraud), health care reform sold out to big pharma and insurance companies, and other consequences of corporate gorging on the 99%.The version I read was updated with a couple more of his Rolling Stone pieces, and I hope this observation was prescient: “The vast majority of Americans are, I think, waiting for Wall Street itself to agree that it deserves to be punished or reformed, before calling for punishment or reform. But it’s never going to happen. I feel strongly that once more people realize this, that they don’t have to ask for Wall Street’s permission to be angry about what happened to their money and their mortgages and their credit ratings in the last ten years, the politics governing our economy will be altered.” He suggests that rhetoric and expensive lawyers have distracted us from what the people at the top are doing: stealing. People ask, he say, what good it would do to punish the people who tanked the economy. “[W]hen was the last time anyone stood up at a car thief’s trial and argued that jail time wasn’t warranted because putting the defendant in jail wouldn’t end car theft? We don’t make that argument because it’s absurd; that’s not how we measure justice…. If we force the people on Wall Street to live under our laws and our criminal justice system, who knows—they may even start to see themselves as citizens of the same country.”
    • 5/5
      Excellent read of very complicated, convoluted economic & cultural sabotage. Good mangement of political bias to reflect truth and impact.
    • 5/5
      Everyone should read this book. It explains very clearly what happens when "Commercials" displace "Guardians" in top government positions.The Guardians are the referees, the government officials, ensuring that everyone plays by the same rules and providing the framework of a free society that benefits everyone. In other words they provide the structure of the "house we all live in".In contrast, the Commercials are the occupants of the house and (within the rules) use free markets and their creative individualism to drive development and wealth creation. Taibbi doesn't explicitly look at it this way, in fact he is rather anti free market judging by his criticism ot Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", but he does show step by step how a group of highly commercial Manhattan Jews (Rubin, Summers, Blankfein, Greenspan, Bernanke + others around Goldman Sachs) managed to obtain the top economic Guardian positions in the Treasury and Federal Reserve and exploit them commercially for their own group profit.He shows them breaking the key structural defenses of society such as the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that had since the Great Depression successfully separated retail deposit banking from speculative investment banking, the deed being done under the Clinton administration with the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, "We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer... etc." .The author illustrates what happens when the foxes run the chicken house and unchecked "creativity" only leads to one scam after another until there's not much left.
    • 5/5
      Finally, someone digs into what caused the recession we are currently experiencing instead of blaming it on everyone and everything besides the banks and the people who ran us into the ground. Taibbi is harsh in his criticism of banks and the lack of regulation pushed through (mostly) by conservatives, which led to the financial crisis in the first place. But he is equally critical of Obama and the democrats, especially when it comes to health care and insurance. Taibbi is blunt and to the point, and some (perhaps many) will be put off by this. But this book is essential reading when it comes to the mess we're in today. And if you can read this book without having your blood boil, something's wrong.
    • 4/5
      This book should be basic reading for anyone who wants to understand why the great recession happened, why the banks were bailed out and why it will all happen again. The problem is, as Taibbi admits, that this stuff is purposefully dull and complicated. At times this book can be a chore, even to someone who took a few economic classes in college.Taibbi starts out with a piece on the origins of the Tea Party to ease the reader in, then talks about how they share their Randian worldview with Alan Greenspan who was the leading force in deregulating banking. The next chapter is the meat of the story, the discussion of how the housing bubble was inflated, how it popped and how the banks survived at the public's expense. I found the most interesting parts to be the more "real world" bits about the commodities bubble and the sale of public assets to ibanks to pay off public debt incurred because the same banks bankrupted so many taxpayers. There is then a description of health care reform, and an overview of Goldman Sachs, Taibbi's famed vampire squid.Taibbi's sense of moral outrage and humor are sharp, and sometimes the only thing that can keep the reader going during explanations of complex financial instruments. His thesis seems to be that to fight this mess we have to understand it, and this book has definitely helped me finally understand all of this finance stuff. Now to figure out how to fix it...
    • 4/5
      In blunt, vulgar language Taibbi plainly explains the perversionsin our economy that have weighted the scales towards the scammers at the cost to working men and women. Prepare to be outraged.
    • 4/5
      Loaded with sarcasm, colorful language, and point-blank attacks on the likes of Alan Greenspan and the leaders of Goldman Sachs, this book is immensely entertaining and also pretty informative. The chapters kind of stand individually from one another and the first two are better than what follows, but the whole thing is nonetheless worth a read.
    • 4/5
      I really love the dollar scorpion origami cover which symbolizes the book's vicious but harmless sting. The book develops in greater detail and touching upon more fields the plutocracy themes mentioned in Taibbi's famous vampire squid Rolling Stone article. He is a master in catchy formulation and simple explanation. In a functioning society with free media and the rule of law, Taibbi's reporting would trigger widespread judicial inquiries, reporting and public discussion. In the US, he earns but a shrug and a gasp for slinging mud and feces at the masters of the universe. They have learned from the Nixon years, that not engaging in discussion will remove a topic out of the public view when the news cycle moves on to a white girl's abduction, a sex scandal or some public shooting. Thus, Taibbi's book is both entertaining, enlightening and frustrating to read. Does the rolling stone in the end refer to Sisyphus (who with a little bit of NLP became a happy man)?
    • 4/5
      At times a piece of writing more horrific than any work of fiction. Taibbi illuminates in a very easy to read style (with jargon simply explained) some of the many crimes that precipitated the recent financial crisis. It left me personally shocked by the very scale of criminality that took place and deeply worried about the government's complicity and / or ineffectiveness in trying to remedy the situation.A couple of minor criticisms: firstly, a lack of any references was a little worrying whilst reading the book. I understand that many of the people Taibbi talked to would want to remain anonymous but there were occasions when I wondered where the author had got that quote or fact. Also, the first half of the book seemed stronger than the second. I realise its relevance to the overall narrative but the chapter specifically on Goldman Sachs felt a little tacked on at the end.Despite these small sticking points I still think this was a very strong account of what led to the most recent bubbles and the malpractices that took place. Informative and a much needed wake-up call.
    • 5/5
      Excellent and illuminating review of how the financial crisis came about. This book is better organized and more tightly focused than some of Taibbi's work. It left me seething with righteous anger and frustrated at the powers of corruption that warp our political system. The book is aimed at truthseekers, and although its perspective leans (far) left, readers who consider themselves "conservative" will still find information and perspective in this informative account.
    • 5/5
      A highly readable yet in depth look at multi-headed causes of the financial crisis. Written in an informal style, the author cuts through the charged rhetoric of the econmic debate, and reveals both sides of the narrow political spectrum to be complicit in crimes that lead our country and the world to its current dire state. The reader will leave the book feeling informed and enraged, at the lies of our politicians and pundits. Although Taibi is certainly a liberal, he unleases equal attack upon democrats and replublicans.