Matt Taibbi: Break Up the 'Too-Big-to-Fail' Financial Behemoths that Destroyed the Economy

By Matt Taibbi and Keith Olbermann, Current.com
Posted on October 14, 2011, Printed on October 15, 2011

Editor's note: This week, finance industry journalist Matt Taibbi put together a list of five political demands Occupy Wall St. protestors could agitate for. First on his list was the breakup of the "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions holding the global economy hostage. In the following transcript from "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," Taibbi elaborates on how to break up the financial behemoths that sunk the economy.

Taibbi: First of all, nobody asked my advice on any of this and they're doing great without the advice of people like me. But ...

Olbermann: It's a democracy, everybody has a voice, take your platform.

Taibbi: Everybody has a voice. But there are a lot of people who have been following this whole issue of Wall Street corruption for years. There's a small community of those people and we've been talking amongst each other for the past few weeks -- trying to think about, what would the demands be? What would a good demand be if it came time to make one?

And the one thing everybody can agree on is that you have to break up the too-big-to-fail companies. You gotta go in and get rid of those companies because they're above the law and above the market. They have the implicit support of the United States government, which is a disastrous, deadly situation for everybody.