Goldman Sachs: We Are All Very, Very Angry

Sometimes when one reads a posting on the internet, the article will set free pent-up emotions especially when one feels a betrayal that is systematic and deliberate--betrayal by the risk-taking of Goldman Sachs, for instance. There are myriads of ways that Goldman Sachs finds to make money and it does not matter how ethically challenged those ways are. Goldman Sachs thinks only of its money-making acumen while, sometimes, mouthing platitudes about clients coming first. That may be so, but our society that it preys upon doesn't even come into their purview. Let the emotions rip!!

We feel nothing but Schadenfreude when we read that Goldman Sachs may have to downsize their company because of fewer profits. Cry me a river!

Here's the article from Business Insider:

We Don't Need "Too Big To Fail" Institutions
By L. Randall Wray, Benzinga - Business Insider

I've been traveling a lot in recent weeks and had the pleasure of meeting policymakers in a number of countries. Perhaps the most interesting of those meetings occurred in a small workshop attended by a couple of policymakers who had worked with Timothy Geithner to bail-out Wall Street. Let me just say that these were intelligent guys with their hearts in the right places. While they probably did not think they were doing “God's work” (as the Vampire Blood Sucking Squid put it), they certainly did think they were operating in the public interest.

They shared a view that what we experienced back in 2008 was the mother of all liquidity crises. As one of them put it, the crisis boiled down to this: the world missed a payment, then all hell broke loose. To summarize this view, we had a highly leveraged and interdependent financial system that relied on extremely short-term borrowing (overnight) to finance positions in assets.

A key link in the liquidity chain was the money market mutual fund, which essentially promised close substitutes for bank deposits, but without the government guarantee. MMMFs purchased very short term debt issued by the shadow banking system (held as assets). When it looked like forces would “break the buck” there was a massive run on the money markets which made it impossible for the MMMF's to continue to provide overnight funding to the shadow banks. This is a $3 trillion uninsured “deposit-like” market that the government had to guarantee dollar-for dollar. All told, the bailout of Wall Street amounted to more than $29 trillion (that is the “flow” number; the outstanding stock maxed at perhaps $8 trillion—still a very big number). That is what happens when the world “misses a payment”.

While this is not the topic for this blog, just think about the possibilities if $8 trillion (leaving to the side $29 trillion) had been devoted to bailing out Main Street rather than Wall Street. We'd be fully employed, driving brand new SUVs, and making payments on our overpriced MacMansions. All that is too obvious to require any explication. Now, I think these guys are wrong. Dangerously so. What we actually had (and have) were massively insolvent Wall Street shadow banks, so their short term liabilities were trash. The run on MMMFs was not an irrational liquidity run, but rather a rational run on institutions that were holding garbage as assets. The federal government made that garbage as sweet smelling as roses, by intervening in the biggest bailout in human history, by several orders of magnitude. And it did not have to be that way.

Let us instead deal with a “what if”. Suppose we had decided not to bailout the MMMFs and let the insolvent shadow banks go down. What if we had not handed bank charters to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (the last two investment banks standing)? What if we had simply closed down what my colleague Bill Black calls “systemically dangerous institutions”? What if we had let the market “work”—in its wisdom it wanted to close down the biggest financial institutions and to rid the world of shadow banking. What if we had let that happen?

We know the view at the Treasury: from Rubin to Paulson to Geithner the view is that we'd have no economy at all. Forget about a financial system—we'd be back to bartering coconuts for fish. That was the claim made by Paulson when he went to Congress and demanded nearly a trillion dollars to bailout his Wall Street buds, with a gun to his head and threatening to pull the trigger. What if we had borrowed a line from Clint Eastwood: “go ahead, make my day”? Blow your own stupid head off.

Here's a hypothesis. We'd be MUCH better off today. The banksters would all be gone—retired to their offshore islands with whatever riches they had been able to hide away. We'd still have, oh, about 4000 banks, mostly honest, mostly making loans to firms and households, and with reasonable compensation and no special power over Washington. This ain't just my hypothesis. In a very interesting (and to my mind, convincing) article, Robert G. Wilmers, chairman and chief executive officer of M&T Bank Corp. (MTB) made the case for me. Indeed, his piece is so good that I cannot possibly improve upon it. Let me provide a few key (and somewhat long) excerpts. The whole piece is here: Small Banks, Big Banks, Giant Differences: Robert G. Wilmers

First, Mr. Wilmers rightly notes the long term transformation of banking away from lending and to trading:

Community banks have given way to big banks and excessive industry concentration; profits are increasingly driven by risky trading; leverage is taking precedence over prudent lending; compensation is out of control. This toxic combination leads to continued taxpayer risk and threatens long-term U.S. prosperity. To understand the change, first consider history. Banking once was a community-based enterprise, relying on local knowledge to guide the process of gathering customer deposits and extending credit. Done well, this arrangement ensures that deposits are deployed into a diversified pool of investments, while providing depositors with liquidity and a return on their savings. Over the past generation, however, the financial services industry changed dramatically. In 1990, the six largest financial institutions accounted for 9 percent of all U.S. domestic deposits. As of Dec. 31, 2010, the six biggest banks accounted for 36 percent of deposits.

Amazing analysis, from a banker. The big banks have virtually no interest in lending. They use deposits to finance their trading activity; and when the trades go bad they ask Uncle Sam to bail them out.

Such concentration raises the concern that poor decisions at such outsized institutions can lead to systemic risk. But this risk is greatly magnified by the new way in which the major banks, those deemed too big to fail, are doing business today. The largest and most profitable bank holding companies have moved away from traditional lending and come to rely on speculative trading in all types of securities, derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other, even more complex and exotic financial instruments -- many of them associated with high leverage. Such trading now is the engine of income. In 2010, the six largest bank holding companies generated $56.1 billion in trading revenue, or 74 percent of their $75.7 billion in pretax income. Trading revenue at these institutions distinguishes them from traditional commercial banks, which aren't typically involved in such speculative endeavors. The Big Six institutions earned more than 93 percent of the trading revenue generated by all American banks during the past two years. To say these large institutions are the same species as traditional commercial banks is akin to describing dinosaurs as reptiles -- true but profoundly misleading.

In reality these institutions are what my colleague Bill Black calls control frauds. Their sole purpose is to enrich top management with outsized bonuses. Trading is the preferred activity. First because they can screw the suckers. But more importantly, because trading profits can be whatever you want them to be. You buy my trash at outlandish prices, and I buy your trash at ridiculous prices. We book profits and pay ourselves bonuses. So long as regulators look the other way, there is quite simply no limit to how much we “earn”. Just ask Hank and Bob—whose rich rewards were due to trading activity.

Read the entire article here