Matt Taibbi seems to think that he pulled off a withering takedown of our own Byron York (never mind that Taibbi seems to think Byron works for The New Republic), but Megan McArdle offers the corrective:

I love Matt Taibbi’s work. I just wish that when he has no idea what he is talking about, he would shut the hell up, rather than making an awkward public.[sic] Of course, in this exchange he looks good to people who have no knowledge of matters financial or economic. But sounding plausible to the ignorant is a rather low hurdle for a journalist to set himself.
In point of fact, Byron York is much more correct than Taibbi. CDS’s (credit default swaps) are not the main cause of the crisis, and it seems more than possible that Taibbi has confused them with CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), the slice-and-dice securities that have done so much to destroy transparency in the mortgage securities market. Professional traders do not claim to understand all that is going on with securities, which makes me skeptical that Taibbi could provide the clear and concise explanation he is demanding from York. The only reason to fixate on CDS’s in particular is that their deregulation can be attributed to a convenient Republican demon.
This brings me to a pet peeve that has been increasingly irritating me as the crisis wears on: people with little or no understanding of markets confidently opining on the causes of the crisis. Funnily enough, the cause of the crisis is always exactly what they happened to be against before the crisis happened, and the solution is for the people they disagree with to be banned from polite society and exiled from the political process.
… And anyone who tells you that they understand exactly why this happened, why we got this crisis instead of the dollar crisis we were expecting, and what kind of regulations will unquestionably fix it, is definitionally too ignorant to be opening their mouth.

The best part is Taibbi’s angry condescension and insistence that Byron doesn’t know what he’s talking about, when he himself is obviously a bit in the shade. Priceless.