Matt Taibbi Gets Closer

Matt suspects a conspiracy in the financial markets. 

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.

Welcome to the real world, Matt.

He bases this on a couple of scandals that have recently come to light:

…the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

He believes this opens up the possibility that everything is rigged:

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it.

Even interest rates!  And the value of money!!! Say it ain’t so.  Who or what is powerful enough to rig interest rates – the price for time and risk of the commodity that is one side of every single transaction in a division-of-labor economy - and rig the price of the money itself?

Matt thinks there is something new here:

These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing.

The banks are only now beginning to realize this?  Come on, Matt – the world didn’t begin on the day of your awakening.  Those high up in banking have known this for centuries.  Those on the outside have, for the most part, remained blind…until recently… thanks to the internet and a certain (now former) congressman from Texas. 

The banks have been colluding in the US with government permission for one hundred years – I think they realized the possibilities of collusion well before they had an official sanction to collude.

He finds fault in the justice system:

Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.

…this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments…. the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive.

Not one comment pointing to the Federal Reserve or central banking.  I guess I welcomed Matt to the real world a bit prematurely.

The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it.

In fact, the problem is so enormous that even Matt does not see it.  He thinks the corruption and collusion has its roots in the too-big-to-fail banks, without asking anything about what or who is behind the too-big-to-fail banks.

The reason the problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the politicians and much of the mainstream media is in on the scam – knowingly or unknowingly. 

How many people support the end of central planning in money and credit?  How many support market-derived banking? 

Conversely, how many call for better regulation or better regulators?  How many call for justice from people employed by the same people who enable the system in the first place?

Matt, you are inching closer.  Perhaps one day soon the scales will be fully lifted from your eyes.  The market could never support corruption on this magnitude.  Keep looking, with honest intent, and you will find the answer.

Here’s a hint:

End the Fed.