[lbo-talk] * SECRETS AND LIES OF THE BAILOUT By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

[c b]

http://99getsmart.com/sunday-read-7-january-2013
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the
hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury
Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to
rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the
bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the
bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the
invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great
Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and
the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods
ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was
stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and
save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up
doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to
permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable,
hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and
inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like
Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it.
The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on
blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought
we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we
ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping
nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn. […]