Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America is a 2010 book by American political journalist Matt Taibbi about the events that led to the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

Taibbi maintains that "all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a tiny oligarchy of extremely clever criminals and their castrato henchmen in government.

One observer described Griftopia as "necessary ... corrective" of the assertion that bubbles are inevitable in the market system,[2] and another review said the book contests the idea greed of the American consumer was a primary cause of the problem.

Taibbi maintains that ARMs and other "financial inventions" enlarged the pool of loans that could never be paid back, yet issuing agents and agencies were made rich by commissions.

Goldman Sachs is seen as the "apotheosis of the Grifter Era" controlling rules and regulations through manipulation of the government by money, pressure, insider connections, and revolving door jobs as a "parasitic enterprise".

He addresses the issue that bankers in Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) hearings laid the blame of the 2007–2008 financial crisis on "lazy poor people living in too much house", a view Republicans embraced as a failure of mixing private enterprise and social engineering, while the Obama administration continues to let Wall Street run the economic policy of the White House.

Daniel Ben-Ami of the Financial Times summed Griftopia up by calling it "a coarse, superficial and one-sided rant that oozes contempt for humanity.

"[4] Financial journalist Felix Salmon has noted that Griftopia is not a partisan book in the traditional sense as Taibbi dishes out criticism at both Republicans and Democrats.

[9] Sheelah Kolhatkar has stated that Taibbi has "legitimate targets" and a "right to be angry", as most of the "perpetrators of the financial crisis have escaped more or less unscathed", and while "the worse things get for average Americans, the better off (are) the top 1 percent".

And not content to excoriate the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan for his near-cultish reverence for unsupervised markets, Taibbi calls him a liar, adding that he "castrated the government as a regulatory authority, then transformed himself into the Pablo Escobar of high finance, unleashing a steady river of cheap weight into the crack house that Wall Street was rapidly becoming."