By Mayuri Onerheim

The Rolling Stone March 2009 issue had an article by Matt Taibbi called Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle in which he likens the financial crisis bailout to a street con and makes a very good case of it, taking us step by step through the con game led by Goldman Sachs. In the article he makes a case that the big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions that were given them to rescue the economy, but that they are engineering another crash so that they can continue to feed at the trough.

There is one paragraph that is such a concise summary, it is worth quoting:

“Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at even more inflated prices—and then, when all else fails, start driving toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economies.”

He goes on to say, that” con artists have a word for the inability of victims to accept that they have been scammed. The call it the “true believer” syndrome.”

Continue reading Opting Out of the Big Bank Fiasco and Moving Toward Self Sufficiency