Matt Taibbi is awful. This article, and all of his others, are hyperbolic demagoguery. This one is particular is so bad that I can't even bring myself to tear it apart line by line. You're doing yourself an injustice by reading it. Unless you take pleasure in misinforming yourself and becoming angered over falsehoods, you're just playing into the hands of a particularly nefarious and persistent rabble-rouser.
The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#32Matt Taibbi is awful. This article, and all of his others, are hyperbolic demagoguery. This one is particular is so bad that I can't even bring myself to tear it apart line by line. You're doing yourself an injustice by reading it. Unless you take pleasure in misinforming yourself and becoming angered over falsehoods, you're just playing into the hands of a particularly nefarious and persistent rabble-rouser.
Your doing us an injustice by not tearing it apart. Help us, inform us. He may be a rabble rouser prone to hyperbole, but that by itself doesn't mean what he's writing is false. Look past the drama and tell us what's incorrect.
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#33So municipalities tried to game the system by instituting closed auctions instead of the open ones, and then got mad, when it turned out that some parties are willing to pay to peek into the sealed bids? An open auction system would not have created the peeking problem in the first place. Both parties tried to institute unreasonable complexity to get an upper hand.
The municipalities didn't try to game any system. Any potential buyer who found closed auctions to be somehow unfair was free to choose not to participate. This is equivalent to what you're saying: "The supermarket is trying to sell 20-oz sodas for $1.50 a pop, and now they get mad when I steal them instead? A policy of giving sodas away for free would not have created the stealing problem in the first place."
Saying the municipalities weren't trying to game the system, is not proven by saying you don't have to participate.
The statement that if you don't like the rules you don't have to participate plays to the nature of your position. This isn't a private business or private project, these are public municipalities that are spending tax payer dollars. In the name of transparency for voters they should not be able to hide what they're doing.
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#34Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#35Matt Taibbi is awful. This article, and all of his others, are hyperbolic demagoguery. This one is particular is so bad that I can't even bring myself to tear it apart line by line. You're doing yourself an injustice by reading it. Unless you take pleasure in misinforming yourself and becoming angered over falsehoods, you're just playing into the hands of a particularly nefarious and persistent rabble-rouser.
I'll give you that 75% of this article is unnecessary hyperbole which adds nothing to the central message.
The central message is very interesting though.
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#36I hate to ask, but might there be a tl:dr; summary? That's a lot of text. I'm interested, but I don't really want to spend that much time on storytelling.
I can reduce it to two words: bid rigging
There, I just saved you like an hour.
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#37Meh . people rig stuff everywhere all the time, only the naive believe there's ever anything like fair business.
Worse, IT people should realize that if Intel's doing it, everyone's probably doing that kind of stuff too.
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#38Matt Taibbi is awful. This article, and all of his others, are hyperbolic demagoguery. This one is particular is so bad that I can't even bring myself to tear it apart line by line. You're doing yourself an injustice by reading it. Unless you take pleasure in misinforming yourself and becoming angered over falsehoods, you're just playing into the hands of a particularly nefarious and persistent rabble-rouser.
Which bits do you have a problem with exactly (or do you work in finance and the article has just rubbed you up the wrong way)? If you strip out the Rolling Stone literary tone and just focus on the facts of the article, "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia" is a fairly accurate title.
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#39'Wall Street does X' and 'the Mafia does X' does not in any way imply that Wall Street learned X from the Mafia - and there's no evidence in the article, either. Typical Tabibi bombast. I suspect bid-rigging, while unethical, is pretty common behavior given this type of auction mechanic - all the buyers are knowledgeable and known to each other, while the seller is relatively ignorant and only participates in the mar…
If you had read the article you'd have seen the scheme relied on corrupt brokers to share bid information between buyers. This obviously suggests that without the corrupt broker, the buyers wouldn't have been able to rig the bids, despite all of them being knowledgeable and knowing each other (in so much as BofA knows of SocGen etc.).
I think the Mafia tag sticks. The brokers bribed politicians in return for being given control over shopping a municipality's bond money to the banks. They then took kickbacks from the banks to rig that bidding process. That sounds like organised crime to me.
Re: The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia
#40I hate to ask, but might there be a tl:dr; summary? That's a lot of text. I'm interested, but I don't really want to spend that much time on storytelling.
As the other replies have said, it boils down to bid rigging. What's interesting about it is the sheer scale. It apparently has been going on for at least 10 years, affects every state in the US and the banks have likely scimmed billions of dollars from it. What's particularly galling is that the entities they have stolen this money from are schools, hospitals, ports etc. Basically, another example of the already rich brazenly lining their pockets yet further with misappropriated public money. All the time hiding behind the supposed "complexity" of what they do and showing apparently no shame or remorse.