Well, the following article (and its many links) pretty much follow Goldman Sachs through its many iterations over the years. Goldman invariably leaves behind disaster and bankruptcies. It is truly astounding that all their machinations are considered legal (though unethical)!!
And it's true. Goldman leaves in its wake a trail of disaster and bankruptcies just as sure as BP leaves behind massive dead zones. Think Greece. Short sales are now used as financial weapons, to manipulate markets and destroy countries. I seem to recall from history that worldwide domination is not a good thing. It always ends in disaster. It looks like Germany is going to be the first country to say enough is enough. When will America?
As the housing crisis mounted in early 2007, Goldman Sachs was busy selling risky, mortgage-related securities issued by its longtime client, Washington Mutual, a major bank based in Seattle.
Although Goldman had decided months earlier that the mortgage market was headed for a fall, it continued to sell the WaMu securities to investors. While Goldman put its imprimatur on that offering, traders in the same Goldman unit were not so sanguine about WaMu’s prospects: they were betting that the value of WaMu’s stock and other securities would decline.
Goldman’s wager against its customer’s stock — a position known as a “short” — was large enough that it would have generated at least $10 million in profits if WaMu collapsed, according to documents recently released by Congress. And by mid-May, Goldman’s bet against other WaMu securities had made Goldman $2.5 million, the documents show.
WaMu eventually did collapse under the weight of souring mortgage loans; federal regulators seized it in September 2008, making it the biggest bank failure in American history.
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Read the rest here
7 COMMENTS:
Wall Street Threatens Washington as Reform Vote Approaches
Naked shorting is illegal in the US, and for very good reasons. On a larger scale, it is used for price manipulation, and is the equivalent of counterfeiting. The removal of the uptick rule by the SEC on July 6, 2007, which had been created in 1938 as part of the New Deal regulatory reforms, cleared the way for its more heavy handed uses and control frauds.
The ban on naked short selling was not enforced by regulators who were willing to turn a blind eye to blatant market manipulation. Under the DTCC regime it turned epidemic. The alarm was raised by many whistle blowers who were either ignored or vilified by the corporate media.
It became so outrageous that the US had to intervene during its banking crisis that triggered this global financial crisis, and selectively enforce the law to protect its banks from each other and the packs of unregulated hedge funds led by Goldman Sachs.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/05/wall-street-threatens-washington-as.html
Shadow Elite: Derivatives, A Horror Story
With journalists stumped, could anyone in the Washington power "village" stand in the way of runaway derivatives, and the banks that wanted to keep them unregulated? Ironically, there were few policymakers more capable of understanding derivatives or their real world impact than Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. And both were there when derivatives could have been at least partially reined in before they became, to quote Warren Buffett, "financial weapons of mass destruction". Instead they did exactly the opposite, blocking key regulation at pivotal moments, as we saw in Summers' remarks above, with Rubin going on to benefit from this deregulated Wild West when he left Washington and returned to Wall Street as a top executive.
Here again, taking an anthropological view can be instructive. Consider the elite conclaves both came from, and the biases and potential conflicts attached to them. Rubin originally came to Washington after decades at Goldman Sachs, a firm renown for its culture of invincibility. Summers came from a somewhat similar culture - Harvard - with ample faith in both himself and the efficacy of the free market.
http://tinyurl.com/2u7uyp9
The above is a very solid article on the anthropological view of "elites" and their derivatives.
When I first became interested in what was causing the housing bubble, the general journalistic opinion that I encountered was that it was too complicated to understand (something often said to children when parents don't want to explain something).
I read and read until it became easier to understand derivatives, CDOs, CDSs, naked shorts, longs, etc. One does "not" need a PhD to understand the essentials and as more and more people begin to truly understand, then things will for sure change.
Truth be told..it seems lying today is a virtue. Now I understand everything!
Keiser Report
This week we look at the scandals of lying children, probing banks, Wall Street barbarism and German fantasies.
http://tinyurl.com/29ma7mw
4-10.THE GOLDMAN SACHS GANG
BREAKING NEWS: 5-18-10
GOLDMAN SACHS CAUGHT RED-HANDED!!!!!!!!!
GOLDMAN SACHS ASSUMED I EXHAUSTED ALL OF MY EFFORTS TO STOP A WRONGFUL FORECLOSURE ON THE AUCTION BLOCK FOR 1- GOLDMAN SACHS HURRIEDLY AND SECRETLY ASSIGNED A 2ND DEED OF TRUST (Recorded Date of fraudulent Assignment 12/30/2009) AND CREATED A FALSE 2ND DEED OF TRUST (Not recorded, Never existed) FOR $118,800. (Click on Fraudulent Goldman Sachs Assignment above)
I ONLY HAVE A 1ST DEED OF TRUST WHICH IS APPROX. 1 MILLION DOLLARS. I NEVER HAD A 2ND DEED OF TRUST ON MY PROPERTY. THE RECORDED FRAUDULENT ASSIGNMENT IS SIGNED BY A GOLDMAN SACHS EMPLOYEE, JOHN CRANDALL (CHECK THIS OUT: http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/john-crandall-litton-mortgage-promiss-solutions/)
I DISCOVERED THIS CRIMINAL ACT WHEN I HAD A TITLE SEARCH RAN ON MY PROPERTY LAST MONTH DUE TO THE COMMUNITY PROPERTY ISSUE CAUSED BY GOLDMAN SACHS. UNBEKNOWNST TO ME, I FOUND THE “SMOKING GUN”.
THESE LAST MINUTE FALSE ASSIGNMENT SCHEMES ARE DONE BY ASSIGNING FALSE DOCUMENTS FROM THE TRUE MORTGAGE HOLDER IN ODER TO OBTAIN THE PAYOFF FUNDS AT THE AUCTION BLOCK ONCE THE PROPERTY IS SOLD. THE STATE OF MASSACHUSEETS IS INVESTIGATING AND INDICTING THESE TYPES OF SCHEMES HEAVILY DUE TO THE “KATRINA LOANS” THAT GOLDMAN SACHS LEFT THEM WITH.
WHY GOLDMAN SACHS IS CAUSING ME HARM AND COUNTLESS OTHERS. IT’S PURE GREED! IT LOOKS LIKE THE MILLION DOLLARS THAT GOLDMAN SACHS MADE ON THE CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP FROM FORCING MY LOAN TO DEFAULT ON 5-11-09, MAY HAVE RUN OUT.
I HAVE BEEN IN LITIGATION WITH THESE CROOKS, SPENDING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN ATTORNEYS FEES AND HAVE BEEN PROVIDED WITH MOCK HEARINGS SINCE FEB 2009, TRYING TO SAVE MY HOME.
WE NEED SOME JUSTICE HERE! OBAMA, I’M DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Visit my blog at http://bushnellcomplaint.blogspot.com/
To lookup the Pending Case Information.
"Drop Dead Economics": The Financial Crisis in Greece and the European Union
The Wealthy Won’t Pay Their Taxes, So Labor Must Do So
by Michael Hudson
Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?
Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.
The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed a utopian desire simply to shrink government that they see acting adversely to their interests.
Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.
But they can be paid in the short run, with promises to pay someday as if any economies ever have been able to grow by imposing austerity! It is all junk economics, of course. But it buys time for the bankers to pay themselves yet more bonuses this year. By the time the financial system collapses, they presumably will have put their money into hard assets.
Bank lobbyists know that the financial game is over. They are playing for the short run. The financial sector’s aim is to take as much bailout money as it can and run, with large enough annual bonuses to lord it over the rest of society after the Clean Slate finally arrives. Less public spending on social programs will leave more bailout money to pay the banks for their exponentially rising bad debts that cannot possibly be paid in the end. It is inevitable that loans and bonds will default in the usual convulsion of bankruptcy.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19107
I really like this blog. Please continue the great work. Regards!!!
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