Matt Taibbi quotes - page 2

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world. (Matt Taibbi)
I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane. View quote
Matt Taibbi
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. View quote
Matt Taibbi
You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class. View quote
Matt Taibbi
I've never thought much of Joe Biden. But man, did he get it right in last night's debate, and not just because he walloped sniveling little Paul Ryan on the facts. What he got absolutely right, despite what you might read this morning (many outlets are criticizing Biden's dramatic excesses), was his tone. Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms. But he should have! He was absolutely right to be doing it. We all should be doing it. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called "objective" news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, "Come back when you're serious." View quote
Matt Taibbi
In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are. (Matt Taibbi)
Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and 'Snow White' videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues. View quote
Matt Taibbi
What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them. View quote
Matt Taibbi
I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill. View quote
Matt Taibbi
If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat. View quote
Matt Taibbi
What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. (Matt Taibbi)
Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. View quote
Matt Taibbi
There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true. View quote
Matt Taibbi
At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. View quote
Matt Taibbi