Matt Taibbi Grateful For Funny-Looking People

Imus is sick of reading about the problems with the economy and the financial system. Except, that is, when Matt Taibbi is the one writing about it. The appeal of Taibbi’s Rolling Stone articles is equal parts depth and humor; he drops the F-bomb and makes fun of people’s look while simultaneously fleshing out an extremely complicated subject.

He admitted that the funny looks help. “One of the saving graces of this entire issue is that there’s a lot of really hideously ugly people involved in the entire thing,” said Taibbi.

His latest piece, entitled Wall Street’s Big Win, focuses on the recent financial regulatory reform bill that passed through Congress. “The bill is like the Hemingway novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’” Taibbi said. “The old man goes out there, he catches this huge fish, and he’s all psyched, he’s like, ‘I’m going to bring this fish back and everybody’s going to be so proud of me.’”

Naturally, by the time the old man returns to shore, the fish is a skeleton. “That’s what happened with this bill,” Taibbi said. “It started off with a whole lot of really good ideas, but by the time it got through the loophole process and all the backroom negotiations, there was really not a whole lot left in the skeleton.”

And the fault lies with both Democrats and Republicans. “Like the financial crisis itself, it was a truly kind of bipartisan problem,” said Taibbi.

Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts, a Republican, was viewed as the so-called “swing vote” on the bill, signing on once he obtained a bunch of exemptions for banks and investment companies in his state. But as Taibbi pointed out, he’s no more at fault than the Democrats, many of whom wanted these exemptions themselves.

Imus wondered why politicians don’t actually want to reform the financial sector. “If the economy goes the way it’s headed again, it’s going to ruin their lives too,” he observed.

While Taibbi has heard behind-the-scenes discussion alluding to the importance of fixing the financial sector to ensure continued campaign contributions for Congress, he has also heard from people on Wall Street, where not everybody was so upset with how business was running over the last decade.

“Even though the banks themselves didn’t do well, the individuals came out with enormous bonuses and enormous profits,” he said.

But what was happening on Wall Street more closely resembled a crime wave, in Taibbi’s view, than legitimate business practices.

“Meth addicts were borrowing houses, and they were mis-marking those mortgages as triple-A investments, and selling them off to pension funds and foreign trade unions,” said Taibbi, who believes this sort of scam, or something very similar, is still going on.

While Taibbi keeps us entertained by what is otherwise a mind-numbingly mundane story, Imus will keep track of Taibbi’s marriage, which is just a few weeks old.

“We’re still married as of this minute,” he reported this morning. “I haven’t gotten a call yet.”

-Julie Kanfer