Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
The opportunity to secure an exclusive interview with Matt Taibbi is something I thought I’d never get…but alas, here we are.
Taibbi is the head of Racket News and his reputation as a fearless investigative journalist precedes him. From his groundbreaking coverage of the 2008 financial crisis to his more recent explorations of censorship with the Twitter Files, politics, systemic inequality and the inner workings of Congress, Taibbi’s body of work reflects a deep commitment to uncovering truths and challenging conventional narratives.
To have the opportunity to pick his brain is a rare privilege that I’m happy to bring my readers.
First, I asked Matt about why more people on main street don’t know about how the Fed works. He told me: “They also do a tremendous job of keeping people like Nomi Prins or whoever else who might be trying to explain some of these issues, keeping them from the public. It was very frustrating after 2008 trying to get anyone at all to comment on, you know, what exactly QE was, you know, or give an explanation that would make sense to an ordinary person.”
He added: “You just, it’s almost like there’s been a proclamation that these issues are sort of out of bounds for the ordinary person, which is unfortunate because they have critical importance for every single person on the planet, which, I mean, as you know, it’s just very frustrating, that dichotomy.”
“And I think that’s true of a lot of sort of high finance stories. I was originally supposed to do just one story about the 2008 crash and what happened and to try to translate that for presumably a young college audience. And at first it was very difficult because I had no experience in dealing with mortgage-backed securities,” he told me. “I didn’t know what they were. I didn’t know how they worked. But once you get into it, it’s really just – it was just a ripoff. I mean it’s not – it’s like a street scam.”
Matt continued, talking about 2008: “They were selling something that wasn’t as valuable as they claimed. It’s like when you look outside and you see somebody selling a phony Prada bag on the street or whatever. Like it was that. It was just dressed up in a lot of jargon and a lot of acronyms. I think that’s true of a lot of these issues. But they, they, I think they intentionally, don’t you think they intentionally keep it sort of shrouded in a lot of jargon and difficult language so that people don’t understand it, yeah they have to.”
Taibbi then railed on Paul Krugman: “So I first noticed this, I guess I was reading Paul Krugman last fall. He did like a whole series. He’s done probably a dozen of these articles, maybe a half dozen, where the substance of it is people are saying they don’t feel positively about the economy, but they’re wrong. Here’s why they’re wrong. And even when the question was phrased as how do you feel about the economy, here’s Paul Krugman who’s, like, living somewhere in the Caribbean.”
I asked Matt about articles like the one from The Atlantic that I skewered last year, blaming regular everyday people for inflation. He responded: “Well, I think the public is much more skeptical of, you know, pronouncements about the economy that they…(LISTEN TO THIS WHOLE INTERVIEW HERE).
