In the following video, Matt Taibbi talks about the report of the Senate Permanent Subcommittees on Investigations by Levin and Coburn where Goldman Sachs is used as a case study explaining how the banks contributed to the financial crisis. Taibbi calls the report "aggressive."
Taibbi talks about regulatory changes that eroded oversight of the banks' business. This lack of regulation is reflected in the substantially lower number of referrals to the Justice department by regulators. Regulators say they used the notion of "verbal referrals" instead of proper criminal referrals where investigations should have taken place.
The interview discusses the position that Goldman Sachs held in the chain of fraudulent events before and after the financial meltdown.
Matt Taibbi vs. Goldman Sachs - video
View the video here
3 COMMENTS:
Nothing has really changed...scum seems to rise to the top...whether you're cooking or on wall street!
How the Robber Barons Railroaded America
White’s scathing narrative is often reminiscent of older histories and novels about the Gilded Age that pit clever, if immoral, “robber barons” against a public that grew increasingly alarmed about the extent of their power and ill-gotten wealth. “The Octopus,” Frank Norris’s 1901 novel about the Southern Pacific, is a classic example.
But White calls Huntington and his ilk “men in octopus suits.” He views them as 19th-century equivalents of the profit-mad, short-sighted financiers who recently undermined economies on both sides of the Atlantic. Both transcontinental railroad managers then and the Wall Street bankers in our time ran “highly leveraged operations” that “depended on continued borrowing to meet their obligations.” Both groups made it rich because they had powerful enablers in Washington. In the 1870s and 1890s, when panicked investors dumped the heavily watered stock in their railroad portfolios, the market collapsed, and long depressions ensued. We seem to have escaped the same fate — with an assist from “socialist” government bailouts and stimuli.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/books/review/book-review-railroaded-by-richard-white.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
Jim Grant still can't figure out why the dollar has held up so long
'The winners in Wall Street have always been hugely rich and therefore have been objects of great envy and great populist animosity. This is one of the great evergreens of American politics," Mr. Grants says. But those earlier financiers "got to participate fully in the downside as well as the upside. Years ago, Goldman Sachs was a partnership and partners were at risk for everything they owned. I think it's fair to assume that attention to risk management is different now.
"Wall Street today is a statist creation," adds the man who has known, loved and chided the Street for nearly four decades as one of its most able observers. "Greenwich, Connecticut"â??where billionaire hedge-fund operators keep their homesâ??"is not what Fifth Avenue was in the Edwardian age. Greenwich, Connecticut will be the last to sign up for the new gold standard."
Mr. Grant is also a critic—albeit with caveats—of today's great bankers, whom he says in one respect don't hold a candle to their gilded forebears. "When you take away the downside, you take away the virtue. You take away the moral foundation of markets. You always have envy but now the envy is a little better grounded in objective facts. Taxpayers get the downside. Modern-day Wall Street gets the upside."
http://gata.org/node/10142
Wall Street’s Euthanasia of Industry
The important thing is that now Ms. Bair is saying look, people said that there would’ve been a meltdown I you didn’t give all this 13 trillion to Citibank, to AIG and to Goldman Sacks but the fact is that we at the FDIC wound down Washington Mutual. Our business is winding down bad banks. Citibank could have gone under and all the other banks and the depositors wouldn’t have lost. They would’ve all been insured because there were plenty of bank assets. There weren’t enough assets in Citibank and AIG to pay the gamblers and the big players, the wealthiest one percent. And she said in every case they were told the wealthiest one percent can’t afford to lose a penny.
http://michael-hudson.com/2011/07/the-euthanasia-of-industry/
Post a Comment