Will Goldman pay for its disaster?

From the Automatic Earth:

Katie Bar The Door

Ilargi: Some things are more equal than others. Always have been. Just maybe not always the same things. Which makes me think of Marie-Antoinette fleeing the cake-eaters in her stagecoach. It also makes me think of this:

If this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the door

[Stuart] Smith, [a lawyer in New Orleans, who's suing BP] on behalf of fishermen, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and four large hotels, alleges that BP and others were "grossly negligent" in allowing the blowout to occur. [..] Because the spill has been lingering offshore, the plaintiffs who can claim damages so far are mostly out-of-work fishermen and tourist resorts that are getting cancellations. As rich as BP is, "if this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the door," Smith said. "I don't think they have enough money."


BP has been shown off late to be a crummy crappy sort of organization, which -with the full faith and credit of the UK and US government- has cut all corners it could find, and then made some more to cut. And now BP has been exposed, and people like Mr. Smith are dead-set to make BP pay, while the company itself is frantically trying to mitigaste its losses through lawyers it couldn't even really afford anymore if it were to pay full damages to all parties.

Which in turn makes my warped brain wonder what the difference is between BP and, say, Goldman Sachs. Environmental disaster, financial disaster, what’s the difference? Is it just that the latter is harder to prove? I don’t know, for one thing you’d think the reward, hence the incentive, would be greater too. Yes, BP has destroyed the livelihood of fishermen and "hospitality workers". So they should be sued for that. But the Wall Street cabal has destroyed the entire economies of entire countries, as well as countless building blocks that formed the foundation of these economies. Towns, pension funds, you name it. No matter how bad Deepwater Horizon will turn out to be, the Vampire Squid disaster will be many times worse, even if it takes longer for it to trickle down to people's conscious brains.

So why is no-one, 2-3 years after the economy started collapsing, suing the Squid? Why does it instead receive ever more funds from the very people it financially strangled? Isn't that the oddest thing, if you think about it? Of course, the fact that there's trillions of public funds now stashed away in Wall Street firms, without which they'd no longer exist, complicates the matter enormously. As a lawyer, you could potentially win huge settlements for your clients, but they’d sort of end up paying for them out of their own pockets.

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