Stephen Colbert interviews Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi about Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

"The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come."
 
Read Matt Taibbi's Secrets and Lies of the Bailout in Rolling Stone here.


 
Matt Taibbi: Did you see the movie Con Air? They [HSBC] basically laundered money for everybody in that airplane. So it was, you know, terrorists, drug dealers, you know, mass murderers... I think somebody should have gone to jail. I can guarantee you right now, there's somebody in Night Court here in New York City who's going to get a tougher fine for peeing in an alley than anybody got at HSBC for laundering billions of dollars for drug cartels... They're much bigger and more complex and harder to regulate now, and this new ruling with HSBC and also UBS, which got a similar settlement a couple of weeks later... it's now basically been confirmed that we can't throw any of them in jail for anything because we've established the precedent that apparently they're too important as people to put in jail, so that's what this ruling means...
Stephen Colbert: You famously called Goldman Sachs a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." ...Maybe we've gotten to the point where we can't do anything to these guys because they provide an essential service... If the banks went out of business...
Matt Taibbi: Where would you get your drugs?

ABOUT MATT TAIBBI...
In March 2001, as editor of the magazine The eXile, Taibbi burst into the office of New York Times Moscow bureau chief Michael Wines and threw a cream pie spiked with horse semen into his face, after Taibbi's magazine had awarded Wines the title of "worst journalist" in Russia.
     In March 2005 Taibbi's satirical essay, "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope", published in the New York Press was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman, and Anthony Weiner. The editor who approved the column lost his job. Taibbi defended the piece as an "off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes" written to give his readers a break from a long run of "fulminating political essays" of his. Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze."
     Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, and accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini's volunteered opinion that Taibbi's book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was "redundant and discursive." Taibbi later said the incident was "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years."

— Wikipedia