As one watches the evolution of Goldman, it is hard not to become a conspiracy theorist. After all, Goldman's rise from merely the top of the heap into the stratosphere has come after years of growing influence in Washington as one Goldman partner after another were appointed to senior positions in the Cabinet or White House--John Whitehead, Robert Rubin, Josh Bolten, Hank Paulson, to name a few--and tens of millions of dollars of political contributions found their way from Goldman Sachs into the campaign war chests of members of Congress, of Senators and Presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Perhaps the public interest and the private interest just happened to coincide with the passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act in 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Perhaps the conversion of Goldman Sachs--a non-depositary institution--into a commercial bank, with access to Fed Funds and the Discount window, and eligible for FDIC guarantees on its debt offerings was in the public interest. And perhaps the public interest was somehow served when Goldman and others jumped to the front of the line of AIG creditors and were made whole on their credit default swap contracts with a bankrupt counterparty.
Perhaps. But we must conclude--because we believe in truth, justice and the American way--that Robert Rubin, Josh Bolten and Hank Paulson influenced and guided public policy in ways that was truly in the public interest, and that there was no nefarious connection between all of those campaign dollars and the direction of our national policy in any manner that unduly benefited Goldman Sachs over the years.
Perhaps. But this year, appearances matter. And this is the year that has seen $10 billion of TARP money and $13 billion of AIG money and who knows what amount of additional Federal Reserve funds or federal guarantee benefits flow into the coffers of Goldman Sachs.
So perhaps, this year, Goldman Sachs employees should be content with the tripling in value of their stock--surely a direct result of all of the financial largesse that has flowed Goldman's way--and perhaps this is a year when $3.44 billion of Goldman Sachs profits should not turn into bonuses, without due consideration for how all of that was possible, and where that money came from.
From the rest of us.
Originally posted by utherpendragonIs this your own writing or someone else's?
As one watches the evolution of Goldman, it is hard not to become a conspiracy theorist. After all, Goldman's rise from merely the top of the heap into the stratosphere has come after years of growing influence in Washington as one Goldman partner after another were appointed to senior positions in the Cabinet or White House--John Whitehead, Robert Ru ...[text shortened]... tion for how all of that was possible, and where that money came from.
From the rest of us.
Originally posted by utherpendragonThe likes of Goldman Sachs give money to both parties, surely? And don't they tend to give more to the party they think is going to win an election (i.e. the Democrats this time around)? And haven't high-ranking government officials for yonks - spanning administrations of bothe parties - spent part of their careers at Goldman Sachs?
Is it a co-incidence this firm tends to give most of its money to Democrats. As well as their being a number of high-ranking government officials in recent years that have spent part of their careers at Goldman Sachs?
Originally posted by utherpendragonIt proves what any rational observation would conclude, that either wing in modern democracies are nothing other than flip sides of the same coin.
Is it a co-incidence this firm tends to give most of its money to Democrats. As well as their being a number of high-ranking government officials in recent years that have spent part of their careers at Goldman Sachs?
ie: the American Revolution that brought representative republican style democracy to the masses, has long been quelled by the Oligarchy Express ( you know the expression- don't mess with an old guy in a hurry!) and the path tread by modern governments has more in common with the best interests of corporations than people. Any cursory inspection of the performance of either side of the house of American government in supporting the big end in town ahead of the public interest should reveal this rubric, that the two party system has converged to becoming twin perspectives of the same construct. In fact to construct a really long bow you could argue that the collapse of the twin towers heralded in a new era that signalled a new age, where the distinction between the sides that would rise phoenix like out of the ashes of the bruised American psyche wrought by that devastating act, would increasingly appear as if one arm were both the same.
Originally posted by utherpendragonOr ... perhaps the guys at Goldman Sachs are just smarter than the rest of us and made a sound bet on AIG and the willingness of the government cover them.
As one watches the evolution of Goldman, it is hard not to become a conspiracy theorist. After all, Goldman's rise from merely the top of the heap into the stratosphere has come after years of growing influence in Washington as one Goldman partner after another were appointed to senior positions in the Cabinet or White House--John Whitehead, Robert Ru tion for how all of that was possible, and where that money came from.
From the rest of us.
Originally posted by utherpendragonJust because the CEO's of Goldman Sachs runs the US government in no way implicats them as conspiratorial. 😛
Is it a co-incidence this firm tends to give most of its money to Democrats. As well as their being a number of high-ranking government officials in recent years that have spent part of their careers at Goldman Sachs?
by Matt Taibbi
As originally published in: Rolling Stone
July 9-23, 2009
THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ...
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.