Asleep at the Switch–With One Eye Open

Since I'm already antagonizing Toast today... Let me excerpt and link to an excellent column by Matt Taibbi that highlights the fundamental flaws in the financial system and its supposed overseers:

For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

That's just about the most perfect capsulization of our recent history that I've seen anywhere. But he expands from there, getting into the failures of the regulatory agencies the media and both parties, and why we're really not in a position to make anything much better anytime soon.

Fannie, Freddie, and the New Red and Blue

Go read the whole thing.