Patriots Fan Matt Taibbi Knows Too Much About Tom Brady's Hair

Seconds after Imus announced he wasn’t going to talk to Matt Taibbi today about his forthcoming book Griftopia, which comes out in November, Imus spent the next few minutes talking to Matt Taibbi about his forthcoming book Griftopia.

“It’s an entertaining look at the financial crisis and politics,” Imus said. “But in a way that makes it accessible to people like me, who don’t care about it.”

Though Imus has the benefit of working at the Fox Business Network every morning and could easily find someone to explain complicated financial matters to him there, he told Taibbi they don’t do it as effectively as he does “because they would be put in jail if they did.”

Griftopia refers to people Taibbi calls “grifters,” which are essentially the money-grubbing crooks on Wall Street who play the rest of us for fools while they horde all the money and ruin the world.

“They’re supposed to be the place where money meets good ideas, and businesses grow, and all that good stuff,” Taibbi said about Wall Street. Instead, he believes the prevailing attitude for the last ten years has been, “We don’t think America is going to make it, so we’re just going to devote ourselves to stealing everything that’s left, and we’re going to take all this capital and ship it overseas, and build ourselves villas in the South of France.”

He called the view these people have of the world “cynical,” and their rationale for why they make so much money—that they’re creating business, jobs, and capital—essentially bull crap.

“You’re not really creating jobs when you’re taking a bunch of sub-prime mortgages and hocking it to some foreign pension fund as a triple-A rated investment,” Taibbi said. “That’s the same thing as a drug dealer who sells somebody a bag of baby powder as though it’s cocaine.”

Taibbi admitted the second chapter of his book, which centers on the shortcomings of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, was written with Imus in mind. “Anytime you can refer to Alan Greenspan as the biggest A-hole in the universe,” Imus said, “You’ve hit a homerun.”

Before he became Rolling Stone Magazine’s hotshot political reporter, Taibbi lived and worked in Russia. In the late 1990s he covered a scandal called “loans for shares,” where Russia privatized the most successful Soviet industries and gave them to people Taibbi characterized as “gangsters.”

“I remember how angry everybody was that all the stuff that was public suddenly was handed over to these guys who were friends of the President,” Taibbi said. “Then 10, 15 years later, I come back to America and I find out one of them has become the owner of the New Jersey Nets.”

Though the NBA claims it thoroughly vetted Mikhail Prokhorov before he made the purchase, Taibbi told Imus that Prokhorov’s former company Norilsk Nickel, one of the world’s largest metal companies, is also one of the world’s worst polluters.

“And yet, this guy is a hero here in the States because he’s tall and says some funny stuff on TV,” said Taibbi, who writes about Prokhorov in the current issue of Men’s Journal.

A New England Patriots fan, Taibbi clued Imus in on an internet rumor that Tom Brady’s new, long, luscious locks are, in fact, hair extensions.

“I’m embarrassed to admit I know this,” Taibbi said. “I think it’s anti-Patriot propaganda. That’s how bad things are in Patriot land.”

-Julie Kanfer