Never has a single article infuriated me more than this one. 9 Billion leaves only $691 billion to go, which doesn't include the Federal Reserve's trillions. Source Edit: I'm badging this because it was the first self-contained piece of writing to thoroughly detail exactly how and why the crash of '08 happened.The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
Dude, that is a lot of material to chew on, but I'm gonna do it. Economics has never been a specialty of mine, but I see no reason not to hone my knowledge. Thanks, ref!
For the record: Michael Lewis is a vastly better writer than Matt Taibi. He's gotten several books out of financial shenanigans, and all of them are great. I've read (and enjoyed): - Liar's Poker (his memoir of being at Solomon Brothers as it crashed) - The Big Short (about exactly this) - Boomerang (about the aftermath of exactly this) - Flash Boys (about high frequency trading) Oddly enough, I've yet to read Moneyball.
Matt Taibbi is one of the reasons I gave up on Rolling Stone, which I subscribed to for years as a youngster. Even when I agree with his sentiment, I feel slimy reading his words. They always strike me as less than the whole story, and purposefully so. I get that we can never get the whole truth, that editorial objectives color everything we read, and that everyone has an agenda, but he just seems like a liar to me. NYT covered this particular piece, and while they praised some of his expose, they also noted a bunch of errors, liberties with the truth, and straight up calculated misleading statements.
I dunno, part of me suspects more people would hop on board with exploiting the system, provided they knew how. More than would be inclined to try and repair it.