Taking Stock

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi can be vulgar, crude and beyond incendiary and usually I love him all the more for it. Especially with the piece he wrote in the October 15th issue (RS 1089). Dude might want to relax on some of the heavier drugs though because he is getting super paranoid, and yet frankly I fear he may be on to something.

He addresses the unknown figure who gambled on March 11, 2008 that Bear Stearns' shares value would precipitously drop and was right. Taibbi calls it as insider manipulation, an effort on behalf of this mystery figure to cause Bear Stearn's demise. Adding to the general X-Files aura of the whole thing, there was a meeting that same day of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY which was attended by Both Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and all the major Wall Street investment banks EXCEPT Bear Stearns. And the plot thickens.

It isn't known exactly what happened at the meeting, but by the time it ended Bear Stearns' fate was sealed and investors started banking that the company was going down. Apparently it all has to do with a practice called naked shortselling. Taibbi explains it and I almost understood it which says a lot of his powers of explanation, because banking ain't something Broad gets. I won't bore you with the details or try to explain it myself, but suffice it to say it is dirty and underhanded and generally kind of illegal (you can check out the link to the article above to get the scoop yourselves).

But it doesn't stop there. Apparently someone later tried this with Lehman Brothers and it of course worked again. Vanity Fair addressed the topic in an excerpt from Andrew Ross Sorkin's upcoming book in its November issue. Of course Sorkin is more deferential, polite, etc. than Taibbi and he also doesn't have the paranoid "they are all out to get us" ideas behind his article, but he adds that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs feared they were next. From the tenor of Taibbi's piece I would say that just ain't so, that those two were in on the death of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, but I don't want to fall into complete conjecture.

The takeaway for me is that the banking and investment worlds are dark, murky places and the inside folks like it that way. They don't want the average American to know or understand what they are up to because once we understood it, we would be appalled. It appears that much of what is going on Wall Street is legalized stealing and lying in many ways, but I guess that shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to any of us anymore.

What I can't help but wonder is if we had allowed these banks and investment companies that were deemed "too big to fail" to actually fail, how much would the average American have been hurt? Or would if have just wondered those people who will be fingering their six figure bonuses come this Christmas?

Daydream Believer

Apologies all around gentle readers for my lengthier than normal absence. I have excuses of course (aren't there always excuses?), but I won't load you down with them today.

Sitting on my chair for several weeks now has been an older copy of Rolling Stone (RS 1070), which features an imaginary exit interview with Dubya by Matt Taibbi. For any of you who have encountered Taibbi through his writing or his somewhat toned down election reports via Real Time with Bill Maher (who btw returns to HBO tonight—party at Broad's house, well if I could stay up that late, god bless the dvr), you will know that Taibbi is, shall we say, less than sacrosanct when it comes to his attitude toward politicians and their ilk.

But near the conclusion of the mock interview Taibbi has Bush say that his wife and dad have both given him looks "Like there's something they want to say to me, but won't." Taibbi responds "I think there are a lot of people who feel that way." Imaginary Bush asks what do they want to say and this is Taibbi's response:

OK, here it is. You're the child of two emotionally absent aristocrats who denied you any kind of love and affection from an early age. You grew up resentful and lacking completely in natural gifts or curiosity and by early adulthood found yourself desperate to fulfill the expectations your parents by then mostly had only for your much more competent brother, Jeb. You failed every test you ever faced as a young man and were unable to hold any job at all until the age of 45 or so, at which time you decided to try to win some self-respect by going into the family business. You were aided in this quest by a bunch of narrow-minded lackeys and holdovers from your father's administration who every step of the way manipulated your obvious Oedipal resentments to their advantage, enriching themselves and their friends. All you wanted was a pat on the back and a few accomplishments of your own to hang your hat on, but instead you're about to spend the rest of eternity pondering your now-official legacy as the worst and most pigheaded leader in the history of Western democracy, a man who almost single-handedly sank the mightiest nation on Earth by turning the presidency into a $50 trillion therapy session that ended in two disastrous wars, a financial crisis that threatens the entire system of international capitalism, and a legacy of corruption on a scale not seen since the Borgias or maybe Nero.

That about sums it up. I really do intend to move on from the "Blame Bush" bandwagon, but this was too good to pass up. 

If your curiosity is sparked, you can read the whole thing here.

Losing My Religion

I am a busy girl this week folks, so when I catch my breath there will be more, but in the meantime here are some snippet's from Matt Taibbi's article in the August 7, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone that made me laugh out loud. The article deals with McCain's efforts to woo the religious right. Dude has a way with the words . . .

"The whole braying-to-the-moon, born-again Promise Keeper act perfected by the Bushes and Huckabees of the world is as alien to his sensibility as an Iron John man-poetry retreat. Sitting here in the North Phoenix Baptist pews, he has a look on his face like he'd just as well suck a cock as do an alter call. It's one of his most likable qualities."

Later, Taibbi says this:

"McCain is so bad at this game that when it came time for him to pick an evangelical date for the prom, he chose the one preacher crazy enough to make even trailer-dwelling Southerners nervous—John Hagee, a beach-ball-shaped apocalypse merchant whose views on Catholicism would raise eyebrows at a Klan meeting."

Teehee.

The Letdown

For those of you who don't know, Matt Taibbi is a caustic, rather funny, take no prisoners political writer/reporter for Rolling Stone (he also moonlights on Bill Maher's HBO show, Real Time.

In the March 20, 2008 issue of RS, Taibbi takes on Hillary Clinton. The gist of his piece is that she is a ground-breaking politician, who through her own errors has martyred herself.

The part that struck me the most is excerpted below:

Every woman who was ever denied a promotion for spending too much time with her children or who had to deal with whispers of being a "bitch" or an "ice queen" when in fact she was just being a boss—they all couldn't help but see themselves in Hillary, a "substance" candidate dying on the cross of "likability."

But Hillary Clinton let them down, because presidential politics is not the corporate world, and her martyrdom was both inaccurate and imperfect. If there was any glass ceiling in this race for a promotion, it was the one erected by Hillary herself—you could even quantify it numerically, in the nearly 3-1 lead in superdelegates that Hillary, by virtue of her status as the pre-2008 anointed candidate of the Democratic Party apparatchiks, had wrapped up before the first votes were even cast.

He goes on to say that what really happened to Clinton is that she represents something old and she got taken down by the newer model. It is hard, as a woman, to not pin all your personal baggage on to Clinton in the way that Taibbi is referencing. She does represent, to a certain extent, the good girl that did everything right, worked hard and knew her stuff and still got rejected for the top gig. Many, many women identify with that in one shape or form. (Not that I do, no not at all. Not one little, bitty bit.)

There will always be something shinier and newer and more exciting out there, waiting to unseat the old guard. It happens in business, in life and in politics everyday. I guess it all comes down to whether or not you think change is good.