Check in if you "appreciate" Matt Taibbi.

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19. Frankly

Taibbi's analyses is lacking. He oversensationalizes everything and provides little real insight into what's actually happening. His criticisms haven't changed since Wall Street reform passed.

He goes on and on about Glass-Steagall, but can't seem to understand that without the law in place many of the activities he wants to see prosecuted were no longer illegal. He knows this.

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But the reality is, the brains of investment bankers by nature are not wired for "client-based" thinking. This is the reason why the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks and commercial banks separate, was originally passed back in 1933: it just defies common sense to have professional gamblers in charge of stewarding commercial bank accounts.

Investment bankers do not see it as their jobs to tend to the dreary business of making sure Ma and Pa Main Street get their $8.03 in savings account interest every month. Nothing about traditional commercial banking – historically, the dullest of businesses, taking customer deposits and making conservative investments with them in search of a percentage point of profit here and there – turns them on.

In fact, investment bankers by nature have huge appetites for risk, and most of them take pride in being able to sleep at night even when their bets are going the wrong way. If you’re not a person who can doze through a two-hour foot massage while your client (which might be your own bank) is losing ten thousand dollars a minute on some exotic trade you’ve cooked up, then you won’t make it on today’s Wall Street.

Nonetheless, thanks to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed in 1998 with the help of Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm and a host of other short-sighted politicians, we now have a situation where trillions in federally-insured commercial bank deposits have been wedded at the end of a shotgun to exactly such career investment bankers from places like Salomon Brothers (now part of Citi), Merrill Lynch (Bank of America), Bear Stearns (Chase), and so on.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-2-billion-ubs-incident-rogue-trader-my-ass-20110915#ixzz1hw3IlEJF

He completely ignores the prosecutions that are happening and spins Wall Street reform, the massive reregulation of the financial sector, as ineffective, using mostly speculative and convoluted arguments and ignoring the fact that the law is still being implemented and is already having an impact.

http://www.stopfraud.gov/news.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/100282976