Wall Street's Naked Swindle

Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers Wall Street's Naked Swindle: by Matt Taibbi

A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

"The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team — at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote "serious financial reform," his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news."

In the spirit of full disclosure, this is an article from The Rolling Stone written by Matt Taibbi, both lean way left of center. That said, on the subject of Wall Street these days I am starting to pay close attention to what the left has to say. Their intent for what they say may be different than mine, but the observations ring true.