Taibbi on the Tea Party and Wall Street

Awesome interview with Matt Taibbi on Alternet, covering some of the topics in his new book (which I must read), Griftopia.  Here's a couple of excerpts from the inteview:

It’s the same mindset [as Russia in the 1990s], whether it was the guys at companies like Countrywide who were pushing people into bad loans when they qualified for good ones, or the banks who were immediately taking these loans and selling them off to pension funds and insurance companies knowing that they were going to explode, or the hedge fund guys who were intentionally creating masses of crappy loans to dump off on other people, or the ratings agencies who were rating stuff that they knew was crap. Then at the very top you had companies like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank that were basically getting the taxpayer to buy this stuff through the bailouts, knowing that it was severely over-valued. It was the “let’s get what all we can right now before it all blows up” mindset that you see in a third world country.


There are things that are troubling on the horizon. In researching the foreclosure story that I just wrote, one of the things we learned is that there’s a long way to go down for these mortgage-backed securities. A lot of the banks, the Federal Reserve and the government still own billions and billions of dollars worth. And they’re recognizing that at par or face value, the reality is they’re probably worth five or ten cents on the dollar. So eventually, there’s going to be some kind of reckoning there.