I have spent today working through two books. The first is Matt Taibbi's wonderfully entertaining Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squibbs and the Long Con that is Breaking America. Taibbi's often raunchy and over the top analysis of the 2008 meltdown trades elegant analysis for a kind of "let's cut the bullshit" honesty. His chapter on Allan Greenspan, "the biggest asshole in the universe" is alone worth the price of admission. There is little new except the raw emotional reality of what really happened. And it is about to happen all over again.
The second is Michael Perino's gripping story of the 1932 Pecora hearings, The Hellhound of Wall Street. More than just a story, however, it is a reminder of how little has changed over the past eighty years. The story of "Sunshine Charlie" Mitchell and National City Bank, of obscene wealth and greed juxtaposed with a flagrant disregard for the consequences visited on innocent victims shows how little has changed and how little we have learned.
Clearly we are headed back into trouble, and it is good to remind ourselves that it was not just institutional failure but truly evil behaviour by those in positions of trust in privilege both eighty years ago and more recently.
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