The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).But the major story for him is the transfer of power to the moneyed class. The transfer of cash is only a symptom of a political system purchased wholesale by oligarchs on Wall Street. The whole article is a wonderful, infuriating rant against a regulation-free financial system set up to make money and only money and nothing else but money.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
One pissed dude
Matt Taibbi is mad as hell. From his Rolling Stone article:
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