Griftopia

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Griftopia, Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America is a book by the political journalist Matt Taibbi that reviews and analyzes the events that led to the financial crisis of 2008. The book was published in November 2010. Its main thesis is that the crisis was not an accident of the free market but the result of a complex and on-going politico-financial process taking place in the United States whereby wealth and power is transferred to a super-rich "grifter class" that holds a grip on the political process. The book has been described as a "necessary ... corrective" of the assertion that bubbles are inevitable in the market system, and contests the notion that the greed of the American consumer was a primary cause of the problem. Taibbi maintains that "all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a tiny oligarchy of extremely clever criminals and their castrato henchmen in government."