[Mvandenbergh]

On the other hand, is there a lack of writing about finance with lots of contempt and anger? Matt Taibbi may not be an insider in the way that Levine is but he (and others) often manage to be fairly well informed and they are certainly contemptuous and angry.

I also wonder if to understand is not, in some inevitable sense, to forgive? Is it really possible to fully understand on an emotional level how a quant trader feels when they spot an arbitrage opportunity and be angry about it?

[whimsicalism]

Matt Taibbi is not at the same level as Matt Levine. He is writer first, analyst second.

[wp381640]

Taibbi also has zero sense of humour - like when he reported that a trader was exchanging insider LIBOR tips for day-old sushi not realising it was obviously meant in jest:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/everythi...

[harry8]

>Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it’s hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

"...an image that captures..."

I think it's you who misread Taibi's meaning rather than him having missed something there, fwiw.

[Dylan16807]

Considering it never happened I think it's a pretty poor fit for an image that captures, so either way I'm not very impressed.

[harry8]

It is exactly what happened and is literally in the direct quote. The reader is assumed to be sufficiently intelligent to work out that day-old sushi was not actually exchanged in a quid-pro-quo. It is darkly comic but surely isn't funny. The morally and ethically wanton ridculousness of it is what frames the image according to Taibi in his writing. He's deeply aware of what is going on there, suggesing he isn't is really missing the point totally.

Taibi does not write with a style I particularly like. Taibi's politics are not my own. What he does is write masssive stories that are being ignored elsewhere. Wall street criminality. Russia-conspiracy theories discrediting media. Defence funding and contracting. There is always a campaign to discredit him becuase he upsets wealthy, corrupt assholes by shining a light on their behaviour. I wish journalists whose style I cared for more did that. I wish jouranlists whose politics are closer to my own did that. Taibi does do it and that alone is deeply, deeply impressive. We need a lot more of that with many different perspectives and different writing styles. I'll happily start with Taibi because he's doing it and support him totally that he actually does it.

I'm sticking up for Taibi even though I dislike his style and his politics because he's a journalist practisising journalism and not a cheerleader who is playing an acting role of a journalist on tv. Journalism is to be encouraged. Unfair criticisms of journalism should be called out. Yours is such, be that intentionally or not.