How Wall Street Shakes Down Every City in America

As long as I’m recommending long form magazine pieces, here’s another one: Matt Taibbi’s latest in Rolling Stone, “The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia.” I have a mixed view of Taibbi: some of his pieces are great, others are overwrought and depend more on his trademark expletives than on really getting the goods. This one is the former. On one level, it’s a granular look at a single Wall Street corruption trial that accomplished little except putting a few small-time operators behind bars; at another level, it demonstrates that the corruption on trial pervaded Wall Street’s entire business model for a decade, with no one in the executive suites ever paying a price for it. Worth a read.