Finally, we have someone other than the usual suspects call out the White House on their failure to get rid of the economic team that favors Wall Streeters like Goldman Sachs over the needs of the nation.
"They think it's more important that Goldman Sachs make money than that you make money".
Let's put people to work fixing the trillion dollars worth of repairs our infrastructure needs. I don't want to die from a collapsing bridge or drink rusty water and I don't think you want to either. In this clip, Rep. Yarmuth calls for Goldman infiltrators like Geithner and others to get their !@&^ together. He says if the banks won't lend, then the government should. I have a different solution but one way or the other, something's got to give or things are going to get really ugly.
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I thought that Garcia-Martinez's thoughts on working at GS was just so much bragging and hot air, but it turns out he inadvertently said something that GS didn't like. The following analysis gets the facts right, I think.
Richard (RJ) Eskow
Techno-Thriller: Why Was Goldman Sachs So Worried About One Nerdy Sentence?
It sounds like the plot to a dozen movies: Picture a corporation so powerful that its tentacles circle the globe and reach into the highest corridors of power. Yet a single sentence on an ex-employee's obscure website forces it to move into action. That sentence is so important that it leaves the corporation with no choice but to make that employee ...
More here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/techno-thriller-why-was-g_b_681857.html
@JR but we already knew this....
Goldman Defends Its Trading Practices, Claims It Does Not Front-Run The Market
http://tinyurl.com/lwjppj
Gangs of New York
And don't think for a minute that Goldman and their ilk does not have a 'most shorted' list that it is circulating around to its own select group of traders to target those buys.
http://tinyurl.com/4p2ohh
Naked Shorts as Liquidity Machine
Thomas Wipf chairs an industry group that is trying to address the problem, which is hardly a secret. The fraud is in the open, but not discussed EVER in the financial press or on the air of financial networks. Wipf is chairman of the Treasury Market Practices Group and the head of a bond group at Morgan Stanley. He is concerned about exacerbated damage caused by the collapse of a bank or fund. Translate that concern, as Wipf is worried about exposure of massive bond fraud by Wall Street and Big US Banks during a routine bank failure. Wipf said, "You are adding systemic risk into the market. Investors are taking on counter-party risk in trades they did not intend to take on." In other words, investors are being defrauded and could retaliate if powerful enough. Numerous other bank and bond analysts are hot on this story, but they either refuse to state the obvious or they are not permitted to state the obvious. Maybe after years of operating within the snake pit, they cannot perceive the obvious. Wall Street and the Big US Banks are dead, and are using magnificent naked shorting of USGovt-backed bond securities to remain alive. They know well that the USDept Treasury, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and the Office of the Comptroller of Currency will do nothing. They are dominated and controlled by Goldman Sachs, each head holding a GSax pedigree, and thus no prosecution for grand bond fraud will ever happen. In fact, some research might expose that Goldman Sachs could be the greatest offender of them all in this grotesque naked shorting game. They were a primary player in the last bond fraud scheme, the packaging and sale of mortgage backed securities. This is a natural extension within their field of expertise, their realm of dominance.
http://tinyurl.com/23hovb2
Entitled few...
An American Chronicle of Current Events
http://tinyurl.com/2a5yt92
Danny Schechter Dissects Wall Street in "Plunder: The Crime of Our Time
Why is it so hard for us outsiders to understand what Wall Street has done to the American public and the global economy?
We don't teach financial literacy in our schools. Money is a mystery for most Americans. Most of us think that when you put money in a bank, it sits in a safe until you take some out. That's not the way it works. Our media is also at fault because it is increasingly reliant on advertising from the finance sector--hence, all those ads by lenders, credit card companies and the like. The big-shot elite journalists are, for the most part, boosters of the system, uncritical and compromised. When I worked at ABC News, we had a phrase called MEGO standing for "My Eyes Glaze Over," referring to audience tune-out when complicated issues are introduced. I have had some exposure to these issues in college - at Cornell's Labor Relations School and later, at the London School of Economics, where economics was treated as the "dismal science." I learned more in my working class family and its labor struggles.
What about the ubiquitous lobbyists? What's their role been in this fiasco?
At the end of the l980s, back in the last century, smile, 1500 bankers went to jail for various frauds connected to the S&L crisis. The industry set out to make sure that that would never happen again, mounting a major political push using lobbying and financial contributions to deregulate and decriminalize the environment. They also worked to limit enforcement activity and dismantle agencies and laws - like the Glass Stegal Act, that separated investment banking from regular banking and allowed the growth of behemoth banks. All of this was done, of course, in the name of "modernization" and "innovation." Of course!
http://tinyurl.com/2wlc3d7
Here's some tongue-in-cheek advice for an investor in the present financial environment:
http://tinyurl.com/395j4g2
You are right, Anonymous, that HFT has already been discussed and that together with acknowledged lapses in ethical standards that GS admits to, I feel certain that GS has every capability to manipulate the markets whenever it wishes.
Mass Delusion - American Style
America resembles a 40 year old aging baseball icon with two bad knees, a pot belly, receding hairline and delusions that he is still the ball player he was at 24. He doesn’t realize that his skills are shot, as he flails at curveballs in the dirt thrown by 21 year old kids. The rest of the league knows he is washed up, but he refuses to accept reality. America isn’t even running on fumes at this point. It is running on delusions. Politicians think they have saved the country from a Depression by adding $3 trillion to the National Debt and allowing Wall Street banks to pretend they are solvent. Americans have been deluded by the ruling oligarchs that a $700 billion bank bailout, an $800 billion pork filled stimulus plan, the Federal Reserve buying $1.2 trillion of toxic mortgages, and the Treasury forcing taxpayers to pick up a $400 billion tab for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s bad loans has actually solved a problem created by too much debt.
The American herd has gone mad. A few people have regained their senses, but the vast majority still exhibits the behavior of sheep being led to slaughter. The ruling oligarchs have utter contempt for the average American, but they fear the masses. In order to retain their power and wealth, they gladly hand out two years of unemployment payments, food stamps, and welfare payments to keep the masses sedated. The working middle class foots the bill. Corruption abounds and is sustained by the passage of more laws and regulations. The sociopathic powers that control the levers of power in this country need to be brought to justice if this country has any chance at survival. The den of vipers and thieves have trampled on the Constitution, speculated with the country’s funds, risked blowing up the financial system, committed fraud on a massive scale, and continue to rape and pillage the American citizens. Vincible ignorance by the American people is no longer a legitimate excuse. The criminals on Wall Street and Washington DC must be routed out and Americans must awaken from their delusional state before it is too late. I weep for the liberty of my country.
http://tinyurl.com/2d2mocf
How to Thwart the Assassins of the American Dream
The above doesn't even include the credit derivatives, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and structured investment vehicles (SIVs) that amplified losses. Yet, Arianna notes how America imploded while bankers soared:
"Someone like [Robert] Rubin is able to wreak destruction, collect an ungodly profit, then go along his merry way, pontificating about how 'markets have an inherent and inevitable tendency -- probably rooted in human nature -- to go to excess, both on the upside and the downside.' This from the man who, as Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary, was vociferous in opposing the regulation of derivatives -- a key factor in the current economic crisis -- and who lobbied the Treasury during the Bush years to prevent the downgrading of the credit rating of Enron -- a debtor of Citigroup." (P. 150)
Robert Rubin operated an economic wrecking-ball from prestigious positions of influence including: former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, director of the National Economic Council, former Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, board member and senior "risk wizard" counselor at Citigroup, member of the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations, and member of the SEC's Oversight and Financial Services Advisory Committee, unofficial econmic adviser to President Obama, and co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Rubin is just one example of the many bankers, who helped destroy the economy while creating a connected financial oligarchy.
This time Congress gave us the Great Cover-up. Bank officers dodged jail time and collected billions in bonuses. As one of my South American friends observes, he's witnessed this third-world corruption before, and this time it's in English.
http://tinyurl.com/2ao2ejj
Please recall the all-nighters on that October, 2008 weekend. Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO, other regulators and representatives of the biggest banks were there, but not GS, which at that time was not yet a chartered bank. Yet Hank Paulson's telephone logs(NYT)show him in near hourly contact with his replacement CEO. GS was ultimatly the apparent bailout champ. How else would AIG ever have gotten $180 billion of the TARP $700 billion? Of course, this swag was quietly passed through to Wall Street, where it was divvied up among the holders of AIG insured, but unregulated CDSs, which otherwise (correctly) would have gone into default. GS got $13 billion on this deal, yet that waw just a start. Bernanke opened all the Fed "windows" and doubled the "balance sheet". The "Too Big To Fail" looters were the beneficiaries of this trillion dollar giveaway. Bernanke accepted worthless or near worthless paper at "notional value". It seems unbelieveable that this massive fraud has been put on America--and quietly continues to destroy our country!
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