Taibbi is pretty polite about it, but Obama’s defense involves a lot of misdirection. It assumes that Lehman Brothers, by virtue of having failed, was the only financial institution out there responsible for the collapse, rather than an example of industry-wide behavior.

Yale professor Robert Shiller delivered a profoundly odd op-ed this weekend arguing that Occupy Wall Street and promoters of “financial innovation” have the same goal in mind, to “democratize” Wall Street. He picked up from his students some positive chatter about “crowdfunding,” where small investors seed startups with capital over the Internet, and he turned [...]

I liked that NBC Nightly News used Yves Smith to describe the foreclosure fraud settlement last night. And she’s right that the ultimate penalty here is tiny for the banks compared to the damage done. Moreover, as Felix Salmon explains in a post actually claiming that the settlement is a win-win for everyone (I’ll circle [...]

Matt Taibbi’s on a book tour for his new book Griftopia (FDL Book Salon November 27), but he somehow managed to spend an hour at one of the “rocket docket” foreclosure hearings in Florida, ground zero for the foreclosure fraud crisis. And he used his typical colorful style to describe what happened there: Their stated [...]