"The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior"

This Fresh Air interview with Michael Lewis brought it like it's never been broughten. I thought I had a good idea of what has been happening in Europe, and then I emerged from the cave. Although after listening to this full interview, I kind of want to plunge back into darkness.

A couple of highlights:

[Goldman Sachs] lent the [Greek] government money without saying that's what they were doing. If you did this in the corporate world, a bunch of people would be put in jail. They helped the Greek government rig its books so that they looked acceptable to the European Union so they'd be admitted to the euro[zone]."

Wall Street, in recent years, seems to have become an engine of unfairness...[O]nce the Bush and Obama administrations decided that you couldn't let these firms fail and they didn't want the mess of nationalizing them, there was really only one way forward — and that way was to gift money onto these banks until they're back on their feet and can function at the center of the economy again. But that, to any normal person who is outside the system, just looks ridiculously unfair. It looks like socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everybody else.

Sing it, Lewis, sing it.