“One evening, my home phone rang. ‘You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,’ a recording announced. And there he was.”

“The entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up. Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.”

A primer on income inequality in America.

How a nation went bankrupt. “Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place.”

How the dream of the Euro became a nightmare.

On the political climate in Arizona.

On the gap between how the world sees Goldman Sachs and how Goldman Sachs sees itself.

An archaeology of debt.

On Ayn Rand becoming a cult hero to Wall Street insiders and others items that make Matt Taibbi angry.

A just-barred Pakistani-American attorney attempts to save a young family’s home from foreclosure and glimpses the contradiction-rich bureaucracy that has emerged in response to the housing crisis.

The author joins his father’s work crew, gutting out foreclosed houses in Florida and interviewing their former residents.

What’s Madoff like as a prisoner? According to his fellow inmates, he’s cheap (“You couldn’t get an ice-cream cone off him”), he’s unrepentant (“Fuck my victims”), and he’s eager to dole out financial advice.

Craig Cunningham has a simple solution for getting bill collectors off his back. He sues them.

A recent episode of This American Life was put together by reporters from Pro Publica based on this original reporting about the bubble-profiteering hedge fund Magnetar.