Brilliant, thorough, very clear, and infuriating, also less floridly reminiscent of Hunter Thompson and Michael Moore than some of Matt Taibbi's other work. In this book Taibbi carefully explains, in plain English understandable to readers like me without a background in business or economics, how a combination of big corporations and the legislators who owe their positions of power to the campaign funding they get from those corporations have been systematically rigging the American and world economic systems more and more in favor of those corporations and the very rich - reducing their tax burden and increasing those of the middle class and the working poor; dismantling the financial regulatory system put in place after the Crash of 1929 to prevent the kind of speculation that led to that economic catastrophe and the years of Great Depression that followed; destroying the network of laws enacted to protect the public and environment from abuse by big business; and so on. Essentially, it's a damning and nonpartisan portrait (the Bush and Obama administrations are shown to be equally corrupt from their respective beginnings) of an oligarchic class of white-collar sociopaths that have managed to take control of the U.S. government and the world economy in a sort of near-invisible hostile takeover and are robbing the rest of us blind, while arranging irrelevant political Punch-and-Judy shows and movements pitting parts of the electorate against each other (examples: the Tea Party and MoveOn) to keep them from realizing they should be uniting to go after the real villains.I have never seen more convincing data supporting the argument that it's time for a new, genuinely populist major party in American politics that represents ordinary people - the other 98% or 99%, depending on whose figures you're looking at.Before you decide what politicians to support in future elections with your campaign contributions, volunteer efforts, or vote, please read this book.

If you like acerbic wit, crystal clear explanations of dauntingly complicated financial ideas, and feeling completely hopeless about the future of the country, this is the book for you. Griftopia has had me depressed for weeks. That said, Taibbi is incredibly smart and incredibly funny, so you forgive the dark nature of the book. I can think of no one better to tackle the kind of difficult-to-understand and impossible-to-forgive shenanigans that are the subject matter.My only real complaints are a) that he gets sidetracked in the first two chapters with, well, rants; and b) that he's occasionally a lazy writer. Anyone who invented the vampire squid metaphor is capable of rhetorical genius, and yet he often takes shortcuts with his writing, taking the easy way out of the explanation and parts feel downright sloppy. If he could rein in the impulses and go through a second round of edits it'd be 5 stars, no question.Still a hearty recommend, for those with a strong stomach for narratives of the super-rich systemically fleecing the middle class.

"'Follow the money' has long been my mantra, and Matt Taibbi's cogent reporting does the best job describing various economic crises of the last fifteen years of any that I've read, peeling away each level of complexity in a way that the layman reader can easily understand our world turned upside down as a result of greedy financiers and their collusion with the government. He details the creation and bursting of the dot.com bubble, the 2004 energy crisis, and the 2008 economic collapse, and like the prosecutor in a Mafia trial, lays out a scathing indictment of Wall Street and those who set monetary policy in the U.S., starting with Alan Greenspan, whose Ayn Randian views continue to pervade economic policy long after her death in the early 1980s."Link to the rest of my Amazon Vine review of Taibbi's book via my blog entry at http://laurie-gold.blogspot.com/2010/...

excellent pop-overview of the state of usa and globalization. wars? blowouts? torture? underemployment? oil culture? la crisis? what one thing is connected to all this? rich fat cats making lots and lots of money. fat cats rule the world!

Note: In selecting my shelves (read, history/politics, nonfiction, etc., I started to add "true crime." Taibbi's book scares me while not letting me put it down. Well, I have finished it and don't have the energy to write much about it now. He spares no one/no level of the greed. I found his writing frighteningly plausible. I'll use just one: He wrote in detail about the packaging and repackaging of mortgages pushed upon people who did not have the money to buy such a house with such a mortgage. He said the banks would put FICO scores and income levels from people who had just died onto the bad mtge applications. If that's true, that's a crime of massive proportions. Then then, he said, they divided the mortgages into best, moderate, and toxic trash. The best were given AAA ratings and sold easily. Those purchasers could gain immediate gains from the monthly mortgage payments of relatively secure mortgagees. Once those AAA's were gone, the companies "repackaged" the remaining, because they were supposed to police themselves--the moderate loans were then labelled AAA and thus sold relatively well. If I understood him correctly, the purchasers kept these for only a brief while, with their gain being the mortgage payments of almost all of these, then resold them before the true nature of the risky mortgages started to make their purchase start to lose money. These and the toxic risks were manipulated over and over so the companies buying them could gain $$$ and quickly sell them off again to unload the junk off on other purchasers. Then they began to make the "bets" for and against their own clients who were buried in these consolidated packages. As I understood him, this mess is all Ponzi and it was then the deals started crashing that the banks and funds began to start crying, Poor us," to the government and by that time the worldwide economy was crashing.I thought the best written chapters were the chapter on Greenspan--talk about a shellacking! He laid out the predictions Greenspan made over and over different administrations that all proved wrong. Then he quoted Greenspan talking as if he had not made that prediction but instead had predicted the actual outcome. The second chapter was the one above on the mortgage bubbles.Taibbi's own predictions are depressing--that we tend not to learn from our previous failures and the few remaining big banks are set to go again with other bubbles.What is really missing from this book are an index and more information about his sources. If as a journalist (Rolling Stone) he has sources he is protecting, he can still add relevant publications, books, articles, documents, lawsuits, etc. I put off reading this book because the title sounded so gimmicky but then I read and heard more about it and realized I had been reading Taibbi's articles in Rolling Stone (magazine). He uses "down and dirty" language to document how greed and deliberate misrepresenting investments was wound all through the American financial institutes.His explanation of the bundling of mortgages, re-bundling and re-rating the lower mortgages over and over actually made money with each resales. He has a chapter on Greenspan that is relentless! Just this night I saw Greenspan on a news program doing just what Taibbi said he has done throughout his career: claim he gave the right advice to Bush 43 to lower taxes but then when the deficits grew and grew, he said he knew then that taxes shouldn't have been lowered. His documentation of Goldman Sachs long-time role in tearing down our economy and world economies is very persuasive. Today (June 30, 2011) headlines in NYT business section are about Goldman Sachs moving jobs overseas. I am reading Mortgenson's and Rosner's Reckless Endangerment which is also clear and fits with Taibbi's. I am outraged that they did not cite Taibbi's articles or this book. Elitism?Reckless Endangerment focuses more on Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac and their role. I thought the Fannies were funded by the US Government but they no longer are and yet they advertise their services as if they are.