American Spectator‘s Shawn Macomber has an interview up today with Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino, who has written what looks like a fascinating look inside the back room interaction between the Obama administration and Wall Street. Macomber says his book, Bought and Paid For, “lays out in gobstopping detail just how well both sides have since profited from this extended dalliance, combining fiery outsider indignation with hard-won insider knowledge, narrative prowess, and a true knack for the telling anecdote…”
From the AmSpec interview:
TAS: Could there be Big Government on the scale we’ve recently seen it without the complicity of Big Finance and Wall Street?
Gasparino: They feed off each other. If there were no bailout, I guess you could say there’d be no opportunity to make money off the bailout. But what we can say is you need someone to underwrite Obamacare. Wall Street is there to do that. BlackRock managed all the toxic assets of Bear Stearns. When they do cap-and-trade, they’ll be creating a new commodity to be traded on some exchange somewhere. The Fed, urged on by the White House, went in and bought $1.3 trillion mortgage backed securities, artificially propping up the market with taxpayer money. All the Wall Street firms that bought for pennies on the dollar are benefiting from the appreciation of a market that is only appreciating because of taxpayer money. Forget financial reform. The banks have made a killing since the bailout. And the average American? They’re stuck with the wonderful stimulus package that gave us 9.6 percent unemployment.
I followed Gasparino’s reporting on the ShoreBank bailout, which had the familiar taint of Obama administration pressure applied to Wall Street firms to help out the fallen community lender. I am told that episode is included in Bought and Paid For.
