H/tip Jesse
When the US economy collapsed a couple of years ago, large swaths of the media landscape dealt with the financial institutions at the root of the debacle with something like equanimity. One of the harsher critics of the crisis’ major players was Rolling Stone’s contributing editor, Matt Taibbi, who developed a sort of loose cannon appeal to the disgruntled, downtrodden, and degraded.
His reporting and editorializing often overlap, and his deliberately opinionated prose bubbles with invective aimed at the villains in his stories. At the same time, his clear and concise descriptions and his ability to streamline information have made him required reading on the subject of Wall Street perfidy.
His most recent article explores the Levin Report, a 650-page guide on how to steal money from unsuspecting citizens, also known as a rehashing of the inner workings of Goldman Sachs pre-2008, which was released by the Senior Senator from Michigan, Carl Levin.
In person Taibbi is quiet and self-aware, a sharp contrast to his acerbic and biting prose. We met for coffee in Midtown Manhattan.
VICE: You’re known for your analogies—how badly did Goldman Sachs fuck us?
Taibbi: [laughs] I’d have to sit down and think about that. It was definitely a serious, all day thragging, though.
In your focus on the financial crisis, why did you decide to really zero in on Goldman Sachs?
After the 2008 presidential election we at Rolling Stone kind of collectively decided to do a story about the financial crisis. I did the first story, which was about the AIG bailout. When I was interviewing people for that story I noticed that every single person I talked to was like, “Those motherfuckers at Goldman Sachs…” and then, when I looked at it more broadly, it seemed like Goldman was a major player in something that had gone terribly wrong in every sphere of business that we were looking at. For instance, in the commodities business they were the first company to get these crazy exemptions that allowed speculators to act like consumers. The Internet stock bubble and mortgages—they were everywhere. So we decided doing a story on them would be good because it would allow us to kind of use one bank as a symbol for everything that had gone wrong on Wall Street. Plus, they have a sort of “we’re better than you” attitude that makes them a very attractive literary subject.
Would you consider them the biggest perpetrator from the era?
Well they’re the most successful investment bank. They’re the richest and the most politically influential. If you go back pre-crash there were five major investment banks: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. Three of them don’t exist anymore. Goldman and Morgan Stanley are the only ones left, and you could make the argument that Goldman’s fingers were in more pies. Morgan Stanley’s former chief wasn’t the Treasury Secretary twice over [Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson].
Read the rest at Vice Magazine: GOLDMAN SACHS OF SHIT – Viceland Today
