Coming to terms with the elaborate financial apparatus which brought us such things as credit derivative swaps and collateralized debt obligations is no easy task, and Taibbi does an admirable job making sense of it all in layman's terms, with help from industry insiders willing to spill the dirt about how things really went down.
What becomes clear once you get past all the fancy mathematical gymnastics is that it was all really an elaborate con game, and we're all the patsies. As Taibbi writes:
What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not worth saving and have taken on a new mission that involves not creating wealth for all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed-out economy. They don't feed us, we feed them.SOME PARTS of the scheme will be familiar to readers, such as the ways that ordinary homeowners were fraudulently pushed into the ticking time bomb of adjustable-rate mortgages, and institutional investors like state pension funds were sold this same crap repackaged as AAA gold.
An aspect of the story you aren't likely to hear anywhere else is the evidence Taibbi offers that Goldman Sachs single-handedly manufactured a crisis at AIG in order to secure bailout funds.In fact, despite its monumental importance, much of the story has barely seen the light of day--like the role of speculation in the commodities bubble that sent gas and food prices skyrocketing, an indirect tax of sorts that redistributed wealth from ordinary people to billionaires, while pushing pushed millions more into starvation.
The road to Griftopia is paved with many financial casualties, but somehow, Goldman always seems to come out on top. In the final chapter, Taibbi reprints an expanded version of his famous "vampire squid" article and recounts the uproar that greeted it.
What was interesting to him was why people were so angry about it, which basically came down to "whether or not it was appropriate for a reputable mainstream media organization to publicly call Lloyd Blankfein a motherfucker." Taibbi writes:
Overwhelmingly, the theme of the criticism was not that my reporting was factually wrong, but that I'd missed the meta-Randian truth, which is that while Goldman might be corrupt and might have used government influence to bail itself out, this was necessary for the country, because our best and our brightest must be saved at all costs."But at least the mystique is gone," he finishes, hopefully. "The drivers of the Great American Bubble Machine aren't producers, but takers, and we know that now--the only question is, what do we do about it?"
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/13/feeding-the-giant-squid 
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