So far, the Department of Justice has chosen not to prosecute anyone at Goldman Sachs for fraud and perjury. Not acting on the evidence that has been put forward so eloquently in the Levin/Coburn Report, entitled Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, would be tantamount to corruption--"a perversion of integrity."
Writer Matt Taibbi of RollingStone has done a superb job of mining the report for its golden truths and of putting them together with other investigative elements to make a sure case for prosecuting someone at Goldman Sachs.
Here are some excerpts from Matt Taibbi's article:
The People vs. Goldman Sachs
By Matt Taibbi - RollingStone
. . . .
But Goldman, as the Levin report makes clear, remains an ascendant company precisely because it used its canny perception of an upcoming disaster (one which it helped create, incidentally) as an opportunity to enrich itself, not only at the expense of clients but ultimately, through the bailouts and the collateral damage of the wrecked economy, at the expense of society. The bank seemed to count on the unwillingness or inability of federal regulators to stop them — and when called to Washington last year to explain their behavior, Goldman executives brazenly misled Congress, apparently confident that their perjury would carry no serious consequences. Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing? crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history. (page 1)
. . . .
It is worth pointing out here that Goldman's behavior in the Hudson scam makes a mockery of standards in the underwriting business. Courts have held that "the relationship between the underwriter and its customer implicitly involves a favorable recommendation of the issued security." The SEC, meanwhile, requires that broker-dealers like Goldman disclose "material adverse facts," which among other things includes "adverse interests." Former prosecutors and regulators I interviewed point to these areas as potential avenues for prosecution; you can judge for yourself if a $2 billion bet against clients qualifies as an "adverse interest" that should have been disclosed.But these "adverse interests" weren't even the worst part of Hudson. Goldman also used a complex pricing method to turn the deal into an impressive triple screwing. Essentially, Goldman bought some of the mortgage assets in the Hudson deal at a discount, resold them to clients at a higher price and pocketed the difference. This is a little like getting an invoice from an interior decorator who, in addition to his fee for services, charges you $170 a roll for brand-name wallpaper he's actually buying off the back of a truck for $63. (page 3)
. . . .
When it came time for Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein to testify, the banker hedged and stammered like a brain-addled boxer who couldn't quite follow the questions. When Levin asked how Blankfein felt about the fact that Goldman collected $13 billion from U.S. taxpayers through the AIG bailout, the CEO deflected over and over, insisting that Goldman would somehow have made that money anyway through its private insurance policies on AIG. When Levin pressed Blankfein, pointing out that he hadn't answered the question, Blankfein simply peered at Levin like he didn't understand.
But Blankfein also testified unequivocally to the following:
"Much has been said about the supposedly massive short Goldman Sachs had on the U.S. housing market. The fact is, we were not consistently or significantly net-short the market in residential mortgage-related products in 2007 and 2008. We didn't have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients."
Levin couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Heck, yes, I was offended," he says. "Goldman's CEO claimed the firm 'didn't have a massive short,' when the opposite was true." First of all, in Goldman's own internal memoranda, the bank calls its giant, $13 billion bet against mortgages "the big short." Second, by the time Sparks and Co. were unloading the Timberwolves of the world on their "unicorns" and "flying pigs" in the summer of 2007, Goldman's mortgage department accounted for 54 percent of the bank's risk. That means more than half of all the bank's risk was wrapped up in its bet against the mortgage market — a "massive short" by any definition. Indeed, the bank was betting so much money on mortgages that its executives had become comically blasé about giant swings on a daily basis. When Goldman lost more than $100 million on August 8th, 2007, Montag circulated this e-mail: "So who lost the hundy?" (page 6)
. . . .
This issue is bigger than what Goldman executives did or did not say under oath. The Levin report catalogs dozens of instances of business practices that are objectively shocking, no matter how any high-priced lawyer chooses to interpret them: gambling billions on the misfortune of your own clients, gouging customers on prices millions of dollars at a time, keeping customers trapped in bad investments even as they begged the bank to sell, plus myriad deceptions of the "failure to disclose" variety, in which customers were pitched investment deals without ever being told they were designed to help Goldman "clean" its bad inventory. For years, the soundness of America's financial system has been based on the proposition that it's a crime to lie in a prospectus or a sales brochure. But the Levin report reveals a bank gone way beyond such pathetic little boundaries; the collective picture resembles a financial version of The Jungle, a portrait of corporate sociopathy that makes you never want to go near a sausage again. (page 6)
Read the full article here
See a video with Spitzer and Taibbi here
9 COMMENTS:
This article is getting absolutely no attention by any of the business channels.
@This article is getting absolutely no attention by any of the business channels.
There part of the same team!
Regulator to join Comcast after OK of NBC deal
WASHINGTON – A top telecommunications regulator who voted to approve Comcast Corp.'s takeover of NBCUniversal in January is leaving to join the company as a lobbyist.
Meredith Attwell Baker, one of two Republicans on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, will become senior vice president of government affairs for NBCUniversal.
Comcast said it did not begin discussions with Baker about a possible job until after the transaction had closed. Baker will leave the FCC on June 3, less than a month before her term was set to expire. She joined the agency in July 2009.
Craig Aaron, head of the public interest group Free Press, called the move an example of "business as usual in Washington — where the complete capture of government by industry barely raises any eyebrows."
Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV company, bought a controlling interest in NBCUniversal after the FCC and the Justice Department approved the deal with conditions following a yearlong review. The FCC's vote was 4-1.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110512/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_fcc_comcast_executive
The Fatal Timidity of the Corporate Media (May 12, 2011)
Want to reverse the decline of the media? then stop worshipping corporate profits and start worshipping skepticism and a strong voice for truth, however inconvenient it might be to the Status Quo.
Lost in all the hand-wringing over the corporate (mainstream) media's decline is a key cause of the decline: the MSM no longer publishes or airs anything that challenges the Status Quo. The timidity of the corporate media knows no bounds. The iconic Washington Post now makes its corporate bread off its ownership of a diploma mill of the sort that it should deplore.
Choose the phrase your prefer to describe this: bought off, sold out, compromised.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay11/corporate-media5-11.html
The People .vs. Goldman Sachs
Was Bernanke held to account for lying to Congress? Of course not. So why should Goldman fear doing it?
If we can't see these guys prosecuted now, before the Statute of Limitations runs (which, incidentally, is exactly what they're hoping for) then you may as well put a fork in this nation and our ability to actually attract honest capital, from here or elsewhere.
It's done.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=185973
Ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est
Armstrong-Bonfire of the Real Wealth
As long as government is the ONLY party who can file charges, there will be corruption and a thriving oligarchy to control government to (1) prosecute enemies and (2) to prevent their own prosecution. We have to understand the nature of the beast in order to prepare for the future based upon simply what always unfolds under these circumstances. This is the real driving force behind the shift from PUBLIC to PRIVATE assets on the horizon.
The same is true today with the bankers who have infiltrated government to ensure their House Always Wins. Most of history is lost in the propaganda.
The bankers today have infiltrated government to such an extent, that we have lost all sense of for the people by the people. It is now for the oligarchy and by the oligarchy. This is why we are really screwed.
http://www.jsmineset.com/2011/05/12/so-you-thought-the-sovereign-debt-crisis-was-over/
Not saying he shouldn't do time but people know who should be joining him...just read the comments!
Billionaire Rajaratnam Just a Poor Schmuck
by Rick Ackerman on May 13, 2011 12:57 am GMT · 22 comments
We harbored no illusions that Raj Rajaratnam was going to beat the rap for insider trading, but we were rooting for him just the same. The hedge-fund billionaire faces a possible life sentence after being convicted by a jury on Wednesday on all 14 counts of a case billed as the biggest insider-trading scandal of them all. The poor schmuck! Like some zoo specimen of ecopistes miratorius, the common pigeon, he seems so very unlucky for having been one guy among 10,000 quasi-criminals on Wall Street whom the Feds chose to make an example of. Now Rajaratnam will go to jail for crimes against no one in particular, even though many of his colleagues who stole directly from investors through deceit, misrepresentation and gray-area fraud will remain free and unaccused. And rich. Moreover, at the time Rajaratnam was trading on insider tips, there were so many trillions of dollars’ worth of funny money swirling in the financial ether that, however much of the grand sum he stole, no other investor could demonstrably have been denied his fair share.
http://www.rickackerman.com/2011/05/billionaire-rajaratnam-just-a-poor-schmuck/
Businessweek: "Not Guilty?" Well, Perhaps
In the vernacular of Goldman and others, these loans were (in their own words now) "vomit", "dog ****", "crap" and other colorful adjectives.
How much would you pay for a box full of vomit?
So how do you sell a box full of vomit? Why you lie about what it is!
That would be fraud.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=186060
What is needed, is to cut out, entirely, from the U.S. economy, the Rothschild-owned Goldman Sachs’ ‘Fed’. Print U.S. Notes, through the U.S. Treasury, and have those backed by gold. Re-monetize silver. Any attempt to restore ‘honest money’ and re-introduce a ‘gold standard’ must cut out the foreign-owned central banks, and print any currency as U.S. Notes, via the US Treasury – with no role, whatsoever, for foreign-owned, central banks…
Bob Chapman Explains Silver Market Manipulation, Take Down By Bullion Banksters!
https://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/bob-chapman-explains-silver-market-manipulation-take-down-by-bullion-banksters/
650 Years Ago:
How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash by Paul Gallagher Printed in the American Almanac, September 4, 1995.
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/pbgbardi.htm
(Comment: International Bankers, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, et al (Ashkenazi/Khazarian ‘Jews’) – sit atop the secret society structure, globally. Fiat (paper) money is their game. All foreign currencies are pegged to the US Dollar, and the US Dollar was taken OFF the gold-standard, in 1971, under tricky-Dick Nixon. The U.S. Dollar is constantly on the precipice, ready to CRASH, at a moment’s notice, along with ALL the other fiat (paper) currencies. This is why they viciously attack the price of silver. ‘Venetian’ Bankers infiltrated the British Empire, and created Freemasonry. They infiltrated the American Empire, on numerous occasions. President Andrew Jackson ‘killed the [Central] Bank’ – that’s what it says on his gravestone – ‘I killed the bank’. Freemasonry (like the Bolsheviks were, and the ADL) is, fundamentally, ‘Jewish’ (http://www.rense.com/general50/zionss.htm) Governments, globally, tend to have a disproportionate membership in Freemasonry. Any wonder then, that governments are more into serving the Bankers (Ashkenazi/Khazarian ‘Jews’), than they are in serving their own people/citizens? (Hmm…Caesar, Kaiser, Khazar…very interesting!)
How The Venetians Took Over England and Created Freemasonry
Conference Address by Gerald Rose, Schiller Institute Conference, September, 1993
Printed in The American Almanac, November 29, 1993
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/venfreem.htm
The Secret of Oz (William T. Still)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswI
The Money Masters (William T. Still)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXt1cayx0hs
New World Order: Ancient Plan of Secret Societies (William T. Still)
http://www.amazon.com/New-World-Order-Ancient-Societies/dp/0910311641/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305448871&sr=1-6
The History of the Money Changers
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradfordSmith_Bankers.htm
“Economists continually try and sell the public the idea that recessions or depressions are a natural part of what they call the ‘business cycle.’ The timeline below will prove that is simply not the case. Recessions and depressions only occur because the Central Bankers manipulate the money supply, to ensure more and more is in their hands and less and less is in the hands of the people. Central Bankers developed out of money changers, and it is with these people we pick up the story in 48 B.C. below:”
Do You Know Where You REALLY Live?
http://freedom-school.com/do-you-know-where-you-really-live.pdf
Crash JP Morgan – Buy Silver! Episode 96, The Keiser Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN0rcNJXFfI
The Silver Bullet and the Silver Shield “The BEST article written on silver in Ten Years!”- Jason Hommel
http://dont-tread-on.me/the-silver-bullet-and-the-silver-shield/
By buying up silver (and some gold) – we can totally usurp the Banksters – we, effectively become OUR OWN CENTRAL BANKERS…
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