Ask Goldman Sachs to Give it Back!

Now here's some change I could believe in (not that Goldman would ever give a single penny back....money is their God).

Ask Goldman Sachs to Give it Back!

Sometimes when you explain to people that some of the most complicated financial transactions in the country were just side bets, they don't really believe you. They think it's an oversimplification. We couldn't have wrecked the global economy because some people made side bets. These are sophisticated bankers with sophisticated financial instruments, so it must be more complicated than that. It isn't. They bet one another, whoever lost got paid by the American taxpayer.

To be fair, sometimes they had the money to pay off one another without government bailouts, but not often. That's because they were largely betting with money they never had. AIG is the perfect example. Their executives made hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses from the early wins in these bets, but then stuck the taxpayers with a $182 billion bill when they lost.

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So, we're now starting a campaign to get our money back. I'd love to get the whole $62 billion paid out to the AIG counterparties (let alone the whole $182 billion we've sunk into AIG all together). But, we're going to start out nice and modest. We'd like to have Goldman Sachs pay us our $12.9 billion back that they got from AIG.

That's all taxpayer money. All of it went to Goldman for some silly bet they made with a buffoonish company that never had the money in the first place. As "sophisticated investors" they should have realized that AIG never really had the cash to pay them.

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Read the rest here