http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2011/05/13/exp.ym.taibbi.mcardle.goldman.cnn.html

Oh yes please do, and soon! I need all the laughs I can get, and the puppy cam is offline on weekends.

Why not just post Randian Bambi vs. Godzilla?

Fantastic. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Poor Megan. I wonder how much Goldman is paying her.

Kind of disappointing, it looks like they cut that off in the video so I don’t know what else there might be, but Megan basically just responded with her patented “everything is too complicated so we can’t know anything” which she uses on a regular basis when confronted with an argument she can’t refute.

By the way Megan, that particular part of the whole grift, making things so complicated that it was impossible for others to know that they were terrible investments, that’s what Goldman is being accused of, it’s not an excuse.

Megan basically just responded with her patented “everything is too complicated so we can’t know anything”

and in the next breath blames the victims for not doing their research.

What were you expecting? Her calculator has buttons that say “1″, “2″, and “MANY”.

Yes there were several more minutes, where mccardle descended in to the craven limbo of blaming individual investors and Taibbi was blinking incredulity, asking her how she can face herself, let alone consider herself a journalist.
The flaming between these two goes back, at least to the initial squid article that Matt wrote.
This show repeats on Sunday and is worth seeking, I’ve never seen Matt so shocked at the corrupt justification that villagers provide cover for the kleptos, but he ended with guns blazing even though velshi let mccardle get in the last ‘word’

Transcripts. NEED transcripts for those of us without that hearing thingie going on.

transcript…
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MATT TAIBBI, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, ROLLING STONE: Well, the Levin report is a 650-page document, and to put that into as short a hand as I can possibly make it, they’re saying that late in 2006, Goldman Sachs realized they were sitting on a time bomb of toxic mortgage assets.

That they conspired to unload those assets on their clients and then bet against them at the same time, and then later on, the report also sort of lays out that in the process of investigating this issue, the Senate questioned Goldman.

They also had testimony in Congress and it lays out that they believed that Goldman lied about some of these activities –

VELSHI: Lied to congress. All right, let’s bring in Megan McArdle. She’s the business and economics editor at “The Atlantic.” Megan, you’ve read the articles. Matt laid out a convincing case?

MEGAN MCARDLE, BUSINESS AND ECONOMIC EDITOR, THE ATLANTIC: I think it’s really tough. These cases are incredibly difficult to bring and when. If you notice, Eliot Spitzer didn’t in fact secure a lot of convictions despite all the subpoenas he laid down.

What he did was he got settlements from firms and in some cases, it wasn’t really clear that the firms had done anything wrong.

The problem is that a firm that’s dependent on capital for its lifeblood, once you drop a subpoena, they kind of have to settle a deal even if they didn’t do anything because otherwise –

VELSHI: Goldman has done that elsewhere. They’ve come up with a settlement, but, Matt, you’ve been on this case a long before a lot of people thought. I mean, one might think you’ve got some kind of an issue with Goldman. But you definitely think they’ve done something wrong?

TAIBBI: Yes, absolutely. I don’t think anybody could read this report and not see that Goldman definitely conspired to sell assets that it itself did not believe in on unsuspecting clients.

One of the great e-mails in this entire document came after they sold $10 million worth of a deal called Timberwolf on an Australian hedge fund and they’re celebrating afterwards.

And one guy says, we found a white elephant, a unicorn and a flying pig all at the same time. In other words, we found the ultimate sucker and this kind of stuff is all throughout the report.

VELSHI: Now, Megan, while regular people were actually affected by these toxic assets that Goldman was dealing in because they might have been in their pension funds or might have been their city that invested in them and lost money.

Generally speaking the other side of the deal, one of those Goldman deals, was always an institutional investor. Why – let just put the argument for – why wouldn’t those institutional investors have done the necessary homework to understand that Goldman was selling them junk?

MCARDLE: Well, I think the fair argument is these investments are incredibly complicated and it’s very hard to know what happened. But the fact is that we generally assume that an institutional investor, like a pension fund or a hedge fund has the intelligence, the know-how and the motivation to figure out what’s going on in the other side. So we don’t offer them the same protections as we offer ordinary investors.

VELSHI: That’s not true anymore, right? I mean, now I think we’ve probably learned that it seems they don’t –

TAIBBI: If I could jump in there, Ali. There’s definitely a legal standard that requires an investment bank like Goldman Sachs to disclose adverse elements of the deal, like for instance, they had a $2 billion short position against –

VELSHI: Let’s spell that out, you’re saying that they had a legal obligation to tell somebody they were selling an investment to they had a $2 billion bet against that investment?

TAIBBI: Absolutely.

MCARDLE: If I could jump in here –

TAIBBI: Goldman actually in that deal even said affirmatively that their interests were aligned with the client because they had a $6 million stake in that same deal. But they didn’t disclose they had a $2 billion bet against the deal.

VELSHI: Megan?

MCARDLE: Look, inherently someone who is selling you an asset is going short that asset, right? They aren’t owning it anymore and you presume that there is a reason for that. Markets are made by people betting one way or the other and what you have to do –

VELSHI: I’m not sure that makes sense for an investment firm, though.

MCARDLE: What we have to do is disclose. It’s perfectly legal for a dealership to sell me a car I’m not going to like or that’s too expensive for me. It’s not legal for them to sell me a car that’s not what they represented it as.

And we set certain legal minimum standards and that’s what happened here. At least, John Losera and all the devils who are here argues that he actually has gone through these documents and says that a lot of these things were disclosed. That in fact Goldman laid out in very lengthy detail all of the ways in which this could go wrong. I haven’t read the disclosure documents personally.

TAIBBI: I have.

MCARDLE: There are two competing versions of the story.

VELSHI: Matt, you’ve read them?

TAIBBI: Well, I’ve read all the documents in this report and I’ve also talked to some of the principals in this entire story. I definitely know some of the client that is Goldman was talking about were completely blindsided by the fact that, for instance.

They were buying assets out of Goldman’s own book when they were told that Goldman was buying these assets off the street. They definitely did not make key disclosures that they were legally obligated to make.

VELSHI: Megan, I think Matt wants to see somebody from Goldman arrested or charged with something. What do you think has to happen?

Because clearly whether or not you think Goldman broke any laws, any of us who followed this got the impression that they were perhaps not dealing in the best interests of some of their clients.

MCARDLE: I think they probably aren’t, just like most vendors aren’t always — look to their own interests before the interests of their clients.

But here’s the thing. I think there is a real desire to have a sense of closure on this, a desire to track down a villain, figure out who did this to us.

And I think that really underweight the power of human stupidity and poor system design. It can produce terrible results even without anyone doing –

TAIBBI: You’re not ashamed to do the job that you do. How you were not ashamed to apologize for these billionaires who ripped off ordinary people. I can’t believe that –

MCARDLE: There weren’t ordinary people. A hedge fund is not an ordinary –

TAIBBI: How about this? They ripped off a billion dollar from Morgan Stanley, which then in turn took a $10 billion bailout from the taxpayer ergo they ripped us off. How do you answer that?

MCARDLE: How do I answer that? I think that, you know, in fact, they do deals with big banks. There are questions about how we should have done those bailouts.

But the fact is it’s not Goldman Sachs’ responsibility to make sure that Morgan Stanley makes money. More than it’s the Atlantic’s responsibility to make sure that Rolling Stone makes money.

VELSHI: It’s a good point, yes. I think I’ll just leave it right there.

TAIBBI: I don’t know how that makes sense on any planet in any universe. That is just insane.

VELSHI: Last word to you, Megan?

MCARDLE: Well, you know, I think that it’s very morally satisfying to try to track down people who did things to us. But I think in the end, justice wants to make a case that Goldman didn’t just do something that we don’t like.

They want to make a case that Goldman did something that was actually illegal at the time when they did and that’s a lot harder standard to meet. In fact like in the aftermath of this crisis, what you get is a lot of cases brought that fail

Eliot Spitzer didn’t make his cases. A lot of Rudy Giuliani’s cases ultimately fell apart. Even some of the Enron stuff has been falling apart. And so it’s actually a lot more difficult to track down –

VELSHI: Not that this conversation could have been a lot better, but we would hope was that somebody from Goldman Sachs would participate in the conversation. They didn’t.

We reached out to them and they gave us the following statement. Let me read it for you, with respect to Senator Levin’s remarks about misleading testimony with respect to the big short, the testimony we gave was truthful and accurate and this is confirmed by the subcommittee’s own report.

The report references testimony from Goldman Sachs witnesses who repeatedly and consistently acknowledge that they were intermittently net short during 2007. We did not have massive net short positions because our short positions were largely offset by our long positions. And our financial results clearly demonstrate this point.

I will just explain to our viewers obviously that long positions mean you’re buying something with the understanding or hope that it will increase in value. When you are short on something, you are betting that it is going to lose value and that’s what this hinges on.

Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor with “Rolling Stone.” Megan McArdle is business and economics editor with “The Atlantic.” Obviously, the article’s worth a read because it stirs the pot a little bit.

Ooh, film, transcripts, Guignol-style reenactments, fictional retellings with Howard Cosell doing the color commentary….

It sounds like CNN included only the dullest part.

Thanks for that transcript.

You know, Megan’s argument is essentially the same argument that conservatives are making about the Iraq War now. Bush and Co. lied through their teeth about what they knew or didn’t know was going on there, the public let them drag us off to war based on that — and it’s the public’s fault.

This part:

I haven’t read the disclosure documents personally.

TAIBBI: I have.

sums up one essential difference between these two in a two-sentence package.

McArdle is of the school that thinks Matt Taibbi is someone deeply unserious who just writes “fuck” a lot. Megan’s comments section is absolutely filled with people who voice exactly that whenever his name comes up.

The fact is however that on research, leg work, facts, having actual conversations with people who have the information — doing what journalists are actually supposed to do in other words, he continually makes people like her look like amateurs.

Plus he’s infinitely funnier and can write circles around any of them, not to mention almost everyone else on the planet.

TAIBBI: Goldman actually in that deal even said affirmatively that their interests were aligned with the client because they had a $6 million stake in that same deal. But they didn’t disclose they had a $2 billion bet against the deal.

VELSHI: Megan?

MCARDLE: Look, inherently someone who is selling you an asset is going short that asset, right?

So, per Our Lady of the Pink Himalayas, the “caveat emptor” policy in place during ancient Roman times — that probably dates back to the Neanderthals, in fact — is the farthest advancement of both ethics and finance that is humanly possible. You should just know that somebody selling you something is, by the very fact of selling it, “inherently” trying to cheat you. Well, now I no longer wonder at McMegan’s crappy writing; she writes her convoluted nonsensical bullshit because actually coming out and stating what she thinks in plain terms would just let everyone know what a selfish greedy little twat she is.

In fairness, balancing her checkbook is too complicated for McMegan to understand.

But the fact is it’s not Goldman Sachs’ responsibility to make sure that Morgan Stanley makes money. /blockquote>

But it IS seemingly the job of the United States Taxpayer to bail out GS and MS because they were TOO BIG TO FAIL. I”m so glad Taibbi called out McMegan for her blatant shilling for the big banks.

…any of us who followed this got the impression that they were perhaps not dealing in the best interests of some of their clients.

MCARDLE: I think they probably aren’t, just like most vendors aren’t always — look to their own interests before the interests of their clients.

Huh. I started my company from scratch. If I had McCurdle’s attitude, we wouldn’t have lasted a year in business. We’re now in our 12th year, largely based on meeting the desires of our clients. I assume McMegan has never started a business and created jobs for people, correct?

Of course, I could work on gaming the system in my favor over the next 100 years or so through corrupt politicians and the like, and then I suppose I could do whatever the hell I please, like Goldman Sachs does, at the expense of all of America’s small business owners and workers. Nah, that would just be morally wrong, really shitty, and will always lead to a collapse of the entire system if nobody stops it, just as that attitude has collapsed every major “empire” or society in all of human history.

Any remedial study of world economics shows this, but it appears ignorance of historical fact seems to be a feature of Libertarians like McCurdle, and not a bug.

McMegan was just out of her element. If she’d been in her kitchen, whipping up a batch of scones (from scratch—cows milked/butter made), she would’ve sent that fucker Taibbi home crying. Instead, “gotcha journalism” ruled the day…

Her admission that she thinks it’s normal for businesses to maximize their return by ripping off their clients to the maximum extent possible explains a lot about her economics writing. Of course, it’s bad business. You can make a little money in the short term by ripping off a client, but in the long term, it’s going to kill your business and get you in trouble with the law.

VELSHI: Megan?

MCARDLE: Look, inherently someone who is selling you an asset is going short that asset, right?

For someone who is the economics editor at the Atlantic to say something like this is beyond embarrassing and ignorant. In the open investment market (secondary), if I buy a stock, the seller (whoever that may be) is not necessarrily going “short” the stock, and certainly has no responsibility for the future stock performance. But the key difference here is I am not a CLIENT of this person, for the love of god. I am not paying this person a fee for advice, advice that they know is bullshit. Jaysus, she is willfully stupid.

If I own a deli that sells ABC Meats, and I know the ABC factory is rife with ebola and has been covering it up, what does the honest businessman in Megan’s world do? Why, he keeps selling the meat while selling ABC stock short. Free market, bitches!

And I love the “these weren’t ordinary people” claim. I wonder if any of the tens of millions that lost their jobs and are still looking because these assholes destroyed the world are ordinary? My guess is Megan equivicates ‘ordinary’ with ‘common’ as she tilts her nose up and waves her hand dismissively.

I truly hate her.

Eliot Spitzer’s lack of effectiveness wasn’t related to the merits of his case, but he had a personal weakness … which was eventually used to get him out of the way.

MCARDLE: There are two competing versions of the story.

Yes, Goldman Sachs’ version and the 650-page Levin report Megan hasn’t read.

For someone who is the economics editor at the Atlantic to say something like this is beyond embarrassing and ignorant.

Thanks Hat (may I call you “Hat”?)!

I keep sending The Atlantic’s “former subscriber” renewal offers back with snarky comments about McMegan (I’ll pay you $29.99 to fire McMegan). They’re very persistent. New offers arrive, oh, every 6 weeks or so.

May I quote you on the next go-around?

Her basic argument is that all companies are evil shitheads that try to screw over customers for their own self gain, therefore Goldman Sachs didn’t do anything wrong. Doesn’t that rationale pretty much undermine the entire notion of Libertarianism that she so loves?

In fairness to the Romans and that caveat emptor bit: Romans were so committed to the notion of fides, trust (think all those banking and legal words, like “fidelity” and and “credit” — especially “full faith and credit”), that they didn’t count a contract as having been truly entered into if either party misunderstood what he was entering into. (Add the word “mutual” to my list.) That would include honest misunderstandings. This hairsplitting over technicalities is a legacy of common law, not civil/Roman law.

Her basic argument is that all companies are evil shitheads that try to screw over customers for their own self gain, therefore Goldman Sachs didn’t do anything wrong. Doesn’t that rationale pretty much undermine underlie the entire notion of Libertarianism that she so loves?

I noticed a slight typo there. Fixed it for you.

MCARDLE: Well, you know, I think that it’s very morally satisfying to try to track down people who did things to us.

Exactly! Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who.

VELSHI: It’s a good point, yes. I think I’ll just leave it right there.

Translation: The corporate spokestroll is getting her ass kicked, so my producer is screaming in my ear to halt the fight now.

Thank you and molto grazie, myshadow!

“it’s going to kill your business and get you in trouble with the law.”
Which, as mcartwaddle would asplain, is why we need to rewrite some of those more bothersome laws.

If we’re talking irresponsible he said – she said journalism, this move just about takes the cake:

McArdle: … But the fact is it’s not Goldman Sachs’ responsibility to make sure that Morgan Stanley makes money. More than it’s the Atlantic’s responsibility to make sure that Rolling Stone makes money.

VELSHI: It’s a good point, yes. I think I’ll just leave it right there.

It’s not a good point at all and it leaves the audience with the impression that there’s some kind of legitimate difference of opinion between Taibbi and McMegan.
If Velshi was doing his job, this is where he might have digressed on the subject of “fiduciary responsibility,” an assumption and legal obligation which makes Goldman Sacks’ business possible. Fiduciary responsibility is what gives the bank a good name: without it, no one’s going to give them hundreds, let alone billions, of dollars to play with.
McMegan’s willful disregard of an investment bank’s obligation to deal with its customers’ money honorably turns her words into a pile of shit and her into a shill. Not that that’s news.
I don’t know the statutes, but I can’t escape the thought that, if we were Romans, we’d undoubtedly sentence everyone involved in perpetrating and covering for this fraud (doubtless including McMegan) to some horrible death for it.
“Crucifixion?”

Yes poor Megan, she was really demolished.

Meanwhile backstage at Disney, Bambi dried her fake tears, collected her big paycheck from Disney Corp, and went out for a nice gourmet dinner of expensive imported Himalayan twigs.

My mind is further boggled by McArdle’s career ascent. She is woefully unprofessional: a serious lack of preparation, a shifty-eyed demeanor, and a distractingly unattractive hairstyle.

She doesn’t do research, so she is left with only the most threadbare of arguments. Of course, Goldman Sachs ripped off their clients – every seller does! She accepts a second-hand report that GS did do proper disclosure; Taibbi, who actually read the pertinent documents, says no they didn’t. Who should the audience believe? She finally falls back on her classic assertion that everything is very complicated, so no one can really understand it.

Anyone in the public eye knows that you need to look at the camera, not off to the side as if at a shiny object, and not have your hair hanging limply in your face. I’m not elevating style over substance; it’s called engaging the audience. This is basic advice she should have gotten in any class where she had to make a presentation, but then I’m assuming she paid attention in school.

Actually it is a perfect statement of McArdle’s world once you understand that she has confused “clients” and “assets”. She knows that her paycheck is absolutely dependent on her undercutting her readers best interests. She considers herself the vendor for her reader/clients even though she subconsciously realizes that her readership is actually an asset, and a deceived readership is an even bigger asset. Because what is really happening is that her client is the ownership of the Atlantic and the Conservative Oligarchy who she is selling her services to as a shill, and the rules and terms are very clear.

I didn’t mean to diss the Romans; I’m afraid I don’t know much about Roman law. However, Hatmandu and Nylund made my point much better than I did.

McMegan is yet another proof that you can land a well-paying media pundit gig, so long as you’re a conservative/glibertarian and your word salad features words of more than one syllable, on the idea that if you throw around fancy words no one besides the dirty effing hippies will stop to ask you what they (or you) actually mean.

For further proof, see here, with Spotty playing the Taibbi role and local Twin Cities right-wing pustule Jason Lewis in the McArdle role.

Where McMegan comes from it’s normal business practice for a car dealer to sell you a car with bad brakes, not disclose that, and then take out a life insurance policy on you. Oh, and they charged you extra for their 100 point safety inspection.

They can’t pay her that much. The sociopathy must come naturally.

Just an FYI for public radio listeners, specifically those who tune in to APR’s Marketplace, whose NYC reporter Heidi Moore is NOT a fan of Mr. Taibbi.

Yet every Taibbi defender here is an ignorant a**hole. So. RT @ritholtz: Taibbi wipes the floor w/ Megan McArdle http://bit.ly/l2vfh0 $$ [link]

Most of the Taibbi defenders always start, “Now, I don’t know anything about finance but…” [link]

moetkacik (moe tkacik):
@moorehn has anyone ever convincingly refuted Taibbi’s fin criticism? I know more about fin/econ than him—enough to know hes generally right [link]

moorehn (Heidi N. Moore):
@moetkacik well, start here: what is he right about? Specifically. Not just “he captures our anger.” What facts has he brought to light? [link]

I haven’t quite figured out what to make of Ms. Moore. On the one hand, I’m sure she can make some valid points from her years of work covering Wall Street – e.g., regarding the breadth and depth of hypocrisy on the financial market fiasco, wherein a lot of people were happy to ignore the obvious dangers and sleazy behavior as long as they were making money, only complaining when the whole house o’ cards came down (SHOCKED-to-find-gambling-in-this-establishment sort of thing). And she probably does know a few honest folks on Wall Street from her time there, as she has stated.

On the other hand, like most big time financial reporters, she has likely made some friends in the financial industry, and beyond that, she has to maintain connections in that world, and I wonder how much that drives her behavior and flavors her opinions. What particularly gives rise to my suspicions is something that happened long ago (by internet standards): her very weird responses in an exchange with NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen on Twitter. I couldn’t find the relevant tweets for that brouhaha in a search, but she basically got quite hostile and aggressive to Rosen (in response to his criticism of financial/econ journalists, IIRC), and she made a charge or two that (as I recall) she never backed up with evidence/data. I wish I could find the links, or recall the details, but I just remember it was defensive in the extreme, and really weird.

So, NPR/APR listeners, Sit auditor cave!

Hah, I should have searched outside of Twitter. Here’s an account of what happened that jibes with what I recall. It includes some of the actual tweets.

The full video of Taibbi’s destruction of McArdle is now back up on Matt Taibbi’s blog on Rolling Stone. (it was missing for a while)

If you watch it it’s no wonder that CNN is posting only an abbreviated version, I’ve never seen such carnage (and the CNN host came off looking as clueless as McArdle).

The fact is however that on research, leg work, facts, having actual conversations with people who have the information — doing what journalists are actually supposed to do in other words, he continually makes people like her look like amateurs.

He earned his journalism stripes in Moscow with Mark Ames, and the post-Communist oligarchist looting of the state is a pretty good template for reporting on Wall Street.

But I think it’s clear now that there is nothing McMuggins can say or do, other than abandon the party line, that will cost her her livelihood. She’s a made woman.