LATEST BLOG POSTS

• January 7, 9:25 AM EDT

  Boehner's Weird Idea for a Safety Net By Matt Taibbi

  

  So my new piece on John Boehner is up online. Boehner I think is not long for our political center stage. He might be the biggest target, punditry-vitriol-wise, that I’ve ever seen occupy a major position of power in this country (of course that’ll only be true until Michelle Bachmann becomes Vice President or Speaker of the House).  After Boehner’s press appearances yesterday I got a string of phone calls from friends, all asking the same thing: Is that guy drunk? Or i... | MORE »

• January 4, 11:24 AM EDT

  Goldman's Stinky Facebook Deal By Matt Taibbi

  

  Got two different notes from readers this morning about this latest Goldman gambit involving Facebook shares. It seems that Goldman has set up a "special purpose vehicle" and alerted topclients that through this SPV they will have the opportunity to invest in an as-yet-unnamed company, which reportedly is Facebook.The way this looks to Felix Salmon over at Reuters, and his explanation makes a lot of sense to me, is that this SPV is potentially a way around SEC reporting requirements for publi... | MORE »

• January 3, 3:21 PM EDT

  Mailbag: Gas Prices, Scientology and Steroids By Matt Taibbi

  

  Well, holiday's over... got that hideous back-to-work feeling this morning, almost like a triple-Sunday. Lots of interesting questions for the mailbag this week. Thanks to everyone who pointed out that The Long Walk is, in fact, being made into a movie, although the Colin Farrell factor makes me a little anxious. Also, all the Russian lit questions are great -- they'll help me ease into my inevitable future as a morbidly obese liberal arts academic teaching two sections a year on 1... | MORE »

• January 1, 1:25 PM EDT

  An Extremely Long Metaphor to Explain Mortgage Chaos By Matt Taibbi

  Happy New Year, America... Have multiple relatives en route to my home this morning, but wanted to post a few thoughts on an interesting story that came out this week before I disappear into a weekend of overeating and meaningless NFL games. The piece, which came out Thursday, is the Washington Post's feature on MERS, the electronic mortgage registration company that is at the center of the foreclosure/mortgage bubble mess. MERS is the brainchild of the mortgage-lending industry and is... | MORE »

• December 27, 11:58 AM EDT

  Mailbag: Corporate Overthrow, Finance Convictions and Salty Writing By Matt Taibbi

  Greetings from snowbound metro NYC. The weather is so bad, my not-at-all-small dog disappeared into a snowbank mid-dump this morning. So from now on I’m going to be publishing a mailbag once a week or so, most likely every Monday. I’m trying to get to as many as possible. I should note that I get many different versions of one particular question, which goes like this: “Your book/articles paint a really depressing picture of America and in fact make me want to immolate myse... | MORE »

• December 21, 8:54 AM EDT

  New 'Men's Journal' Piece Up: Your Burning Questions, Answered By Matt Taibbi

  Just FYI, this month's Men's Journal article is online.It's basically a mailbag, answering reader questions -- I left out the "Why did God make you so ugly?" queries but most of the rest of the good ones are there.As an aside, a quick announcement: after the New Year, there are going to be some changes to my blog. Among other things, I'm going to do a mini-mailbag once a week where I answer a few reader questions. It's probably going to be every Monday. So begin... | MORE »

• December 20, 10:52 AM EDT

  Crisis Dominoes Start Falling With Lehman Auditor By Matt Taibbi

  

  It took more than two years, but there might finally be some capital sentences handed out for crimes committed during the financial crisis. That’s metaphorically speaking, of course. Like the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, whose head was sacrificed during the Enron debacle, the once-proud financial auditing firm Ernst and Young now looks poised to take a spin down the toilet of history thanks to its role in the Lehman Brothers debacle. New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is ... | MORE »

• December 19, 11:17 AM EDT

  Asked and Told: DADT Finally Goes Down By Matt Taibbi

  

  Good news this Sunday morning -- the Senate finally overturned Don't Ask, Don't Tell, meaning it only took 234 years for the United States to begin the process of officially recognizing gays as citizens. In all seriousness it's a great thing, but the amount of time and effort it took to get such an obvious thing done borders on comedy. A former Hill staffer friend recently told me that basically two things were holding up Don't Ask, Don't Tell. One was that a minorit... | MORE »

• December 18, 12:25 PM EDT

  An Inspired Portrait of Hank Paulson By Matt Taibbi

  

  Geoffrey Raymond's disturbing-but-funny Hank Paulson portrait... ... and one of those creepy Blue Man Group dudes?   Raymond's annotated paintings contain notations written in pen by various people -- in the case of the Paulson and Dick Fuld portraits, he went to the Sotheby's auction of Lehman-owned art and handed out pens to passersby. Ex-Lehman employees are in green, general public in blue or black. Getting ex-Lehman employees to sign the Paulson portrait (... | MORE »

• December 15, 6:17 PM EDT

  Bernie Sanders Puts Barack Obama to Shame By Matt Taibbi

  Not long ago I was sitting at home writing something for publication – I won’t say what, except that it was a passage about a certain politician on the Hill. Out of habit I launched into a description that was full of nasty and personal language, and I was about to press on to the next part of the piece when suddenly I hit a mental speed bump. A voice in my head whispered – this really happened – “If you write that shit and Bernie Sanders sees it, he’s go... | MORE »