American - Author | March 2, 1970 -
Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.
Matt Taibbi
BestPoliticsLosingWinningThink
What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.
KindBubbleMortgageOutBigLike
I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.
WorkHard WorkGrowing UpGrowingUp
Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.
FatherPeopleFriendsNeverKid
The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.
PeopleComplicatedTakeOne Thing
In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out.
LifeWorkJobSickCreditYou
When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins.
PushPartyKnowWantWhyOkay
The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.
HouseWhiteDramaPageRaceOver
I don't often get angered by the things press spokespeople say. Most of these people have difficult jobs and are often forced to be the public faces of policies they had nothing to do with creating.
PeopleCreatingSayNothingThings
Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.
TogetherFinancialGlueIndustry
It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
FinancialCrisisSayCompassPoint
2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.
GovernmentSafetyDirectionNameUp
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Matt Taibbi quotes