Review: Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Taibbi does a very good job of maybe at least somewhat understandable the intricate details of financial shenanigans that led to the United States subprime mortgage crisis and other disasters of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. For me, this has three acts in this book:

I) The poor guidance of Alan Greenspan
II) Greed of international finance houses operating in unregulated markets, sometimes tracked to individual traders.
III) The fallout and bailouts.

The "military–industrial complex" was a warning from ‎Eisenhower's farewell address. Taibbi warns:

I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong. What they are, and they don’t realize it, is an anachronism. They’re fighting a 1960s battle in a world run by twenty-first-century crooks. They’ve been encouraged to launch costly new offensives in already-lost cultural wars, and against a big-government hegemony of a kind that in reality hasn’t existed—or perhaps better to say, hasn’t really mattered—for decades. In the meantime an advanced new symbiosis of government and private bubble-economy interests goes undetected as it grows to exponential size and robs them blind.

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