The Great American Bubble Machine - Matt Taibbi

[foolsguinea]

That was supposed to read “Give [del]the poor[/del] everybody cash…”

[IdahoMauleMan]

@foolsguinea

The last two are demand-side spending. Why not spend money on teacher training, physician training, & nurse training, & get more bang for the buck?

Because the demand side is where the customer determines what he/she wants, and therefore drives the evolution of the marketplace. You always get more bang for the buck that way if the marketplace is free, frictionless, and devoid of regulation.

Supply-side spending presupposes the government can divine what the marketplace wants in advance, and then react quickly and make changes as conditions change over time.

I’ll pause for a moment whilst that sinks in, and allow you to laugh. There we go.

If people have healthcare vouchers and want to spend them on physical therapy, then physical therapists will be in demand. The marketplace will respond accordingly. Having a GS-13 sitting in a cubicle in Washington, D.C. deciding whether to trade off a line item on the budget for physical therapist training in Walla Walla, WA against oncology training in Tulsa, OK is a recipe for misallocation of resources, and an impending disaster. Unfortunately, that’s sort of what we have now.

It’s better to give poor people a few $000 per year, deregulate the insurance and licensing market, and let folks spend the money on what they want.

[gonzomax]

Yes indeed you get more bang for the buck without regulation. That is if you are pro oligarchy and pro monopoly. It is the natural order of business to get together, fix prices and divide up the market. This ensures their survival and guarantees profits. How much dereg do we need to have before you realize it is a disaster? Those who argue for dereg are reinforced by corporations who would benefit. They are not for the welfare of the consumer. It is bad for the country .
We have had anti-monopoly regulation for more than a century, because we need it. Corporations have spent fortunes trying to gut regulation. Do you suppose that is so they can better serve the customer? Libertarianism is an unrealistic ,poorly thought out , illogical joke. It has no basis in reality.

[gonzomax]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141106/taibbi%3A_new_secrecy_rule_lets_goldman_sachs_control_stock_prices_unmolested_by_public_scrutiny/
Programmed trading reports are being stopped. If your programmed trading was greater than 1 million dollars ,you had to report it. That was an insight into financial corps big dealings that could have quick and serious impact on the market. But of course, it is none of your business. just trust them, they are your friends.

[Aquila_Be]

Matt Taibbi has a response to all the critics of his piece in Rolling Stone article on the ‘Everyone was doing it’ excuse at this LINK. The responders include Goldman Sachs.

It quotes a criticism of his article from someone named Nell Minow:

“The [Rolling Stone] article makes a very compelling case against Goldman Sachs, but I think the problems it identifies are pervasive in financial firms and corporate America in general,” says Nell Minow, who is the co-founder of the Corporate Library, a research firm that tracks corporate-governance issues. “We need to launch substantive financial reform rather than weighing the faults of one firm versus another.” Minow’s point is this: spend too much time on Goldman and you miss the fact of how broadly the financial system and the regulations that are supposed to keep profiteers in check failed us. And she’s right.

He also responds to a number of allegations including one claiming he’d drifted into Protocols of EOZ territory by picking on a “Jewish” firm, which Taibbi answers in a way that it deserved.

Taibbi’s response includes:

Two, even if it is true that “everyone else was doing it”: so what? Who cares? To me this response is highly telling. We published a piece accusing Goldman Sachs of systematically ripping off pensioners and other retail investors by sticking them with rafts of toxic mortgages it knew were losers, of looting taxpayer reserves to cover its bad bets made with AIG, of manipulating gas prices to massive detrimental effect, of helping to explode an internet bubble that caused over $5 trillion in wealth to disappear, and numerous other crimes — and the response isn’t “You’re wrong,” or “We didn’t do that shit, not us,” but “Well, Morgan did the same stuff,” and “Why aren’t you writing about Morgan?”

Why didn’t we write about Morgan? Because we didn’t. Because it’s your turn, you assholes. Maybe later someone will tell the story of the other banks, but for now, while most ordinary people are only just learning about the workings of the financial innovation era that blew up in their faces last year, the top dog in that universe is going to be first in line to get the special treatment. That might be inconvenient for Goldman, but it doesn’t make the things I or anyone else say about them untrue.

Taibbi’s concluding remarks:

They’re going to say that and more, but whether it’s this time or the next time, the important thing is to pay attention to what they don’t say. And what they didn’t say about this piece is that it was wrong. They didn’t deny any of it. They said others were just as bad, they said I was a bad guy, they said it was a conspiracy theory. But they didn’t say it was mistaken, and that’s the only thing that matters.

So according to Taibbi, at least, none of the rebuttals to his article, so far, addressed the main points or had much substance.

As for me, I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of the ever changing world of high finance in the US to be able to judge how much truth is contained in the Taibbi version of events or in the feeble response (so far) from Goldman-Sachs and its allies in the press.

[flickster]

Great…no “That’s Wrong” or “We didn’t do that” - just “Well, it was just business as usual”

I agree, very telling response