“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.” EndsStatesBigsAmericaNamesFailingUltimateCriminalsFraudConspiracyEnd TimesLimitless Author:Matt Taibbi
“It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality.” PeopleMayBigsRealityAmericaDealsLongingComplicated Author:Matt Taibbi
“In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance.” KindHandsBigsChanceCrazyModernIgnorantBoxingAmerican Politics Author:Matt Taibbi
“Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.” StatesUseBigsGovernmentUsedInterestUnitedCitiesUnited StatesMajorsToolsRateSizeDebtScalesManageBudgetsCorporationsMassiveManipulationAssetsSovereignInterest RateBig Cities Author: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.” KindBigsMagicSecurityLowsMathIncomeDustBubblesMortgageRatingBundlesLow IncomePixiesBorrowersSlappingGoldman SachsPixie Dust Author:Matt Taibbi
“This story is the ultimate example of American’s biggest political problem. We no longer have the attention span to deal with any twenty-first century crisis. We live in an economy that is immensely complex and we are completely at the mercy of the small group of people who understand it – who incidentally often happen to be the same people who built these wildly complex economic systems. We have to trust these people to do the right thing, but we can’t, because, well, they’re scum. Which is kind of a big problem, when you think about it.” PeopleThinkingFirstsWellsKindStoriesProblemBigsHappensPoliticalDealsAttentionEconomyGroupsEconomicCenturyExampleBuiltMercyUltimateTwentiesCrisisComplexesRight ThingBig ProblemsEconomic SystemsSmall GroupsAttention SpanScum Author:Matt Taibbi
