Matt Taibbi: Where Are The Crazy Police?

Matt Taibbi exposes yet another horror:

Goldman Sachs has developed a tradable index of life settlements, enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned. The index is similar to tradable stock market indices that allow investors to bet on the overall direction of the market without buying stocks.

Spokesmen for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

via NYTimes.com.

In reference to the above, Taibbi wonders:

But even beyond that… what the fuck??? This feels like financial innovation as practiced by Josef Mengele meets the Zucker Brothers; not just evil, but wacky evil. I don’t even want to think about what happens when Goldman Sachs suddenly has a large financial stake in the premature deaths of a bunch of old people. Where are the crazy police? Where is the crack federal crazy squad with the big butterfly net? I don’t know about betting on anyone’s life expectancy, but I think I’d like to bet on whether or not this idea ends well.

Goldman, Sachs: Apology Not Accepted

Matt Taibbi takes down Goldman, Sachs apology. A taste:

So some Dutch teachers’ union that a year before was buying ultra-safe U.S. Treasury bonds in 2006 runs into a Goldman salesman who offers them a different, “just as safe” AAA-rated investment that, at the moment anyway, just happens to be earning a much higher return than treasuries. Next thing you know, a bunch of teachers in Holland are betting their retirement nest eggs on a bunch of meth addicted “homeowners” in Texas and Arizona.

This isn’t really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn’t have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald’s and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We’re eating it, they’re counting the money.

Taibbi On Obama's Only Term

I am afraid Obama is heading toward becoming a one-termer. I am not alone...

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He’s going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand — he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama’s decision, it’s weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he’s bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it’s wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

It’s one thing to change your mind or play both sides of the fence on matters that don’t involve human lives, on theoretical/hypothetical campaign issues, but another thing to do it with actual incarcerated human beings as the key variable in the political equation.

"...They Should Be Setting An Example"

Taibbi on Taibbi and AIG and who we should be careful not to blame:

These Wall Street players are enormously compensated, which supposedly means that society highly values their work and is willing to pay them a premium to do it. Having been given that kind of responsibility and trust, these assholes should not then force us to police them as tightly as we police those who we expect to steal from us, like third-rate car salesmen, telemarketers, hookers and three-card monty dealers. With that kind of money they should be setting an example. We are paying them as though they are leaders of society, so they should lead. Instead they ripped us off like common criminals. I mean, the level of morals here is astonishing. In my entire life I’ve never met a drug dealer who would even think about trying half the shit that banks like Goldman Sachs and Citibank pulled during these years.

Well, that’s not true — okay, I did once try to buy weed from a guy I didn’t know in Washington Square, and got ripped off. I was young and stupid. The guy sold me a bag of oregano and immediately, I mean immediately, took off running and disappeared down 8th street. Guys like that usually have a life expectancy of about ten minutes, because eventually they pick someone who isn’t some lily-livered white college student to sell oregano to and they get their heads beat in with lead pipes. That’s what happens in the actual world. In the world of high finance, what happens when they catch you pulling that kind of stunt is they give you fifty billion taxpayer dollars.