I've picked some comments that seem to show where the average person stands on the importance of Goldman Sachs:
Skip G. 22 hours ago
“The operating environment is unlikely to change any time soon, and we see shareholders of challenged banks becoming more demanding in asking management teams to lay out a path to unlocking value in the near term,....” Translation: People are so pissed off that those politicians we bought can't help in the near term, but our rapacious big shareholders and clients can't settle for less than those previously exorbitant quarterly returns we were delivering. Basically, we're screwed until the American people sort of forget what happened or elect Romney and a filibuster proof GOP majority in the Senate.
ikidunot 21 hours ago
A sound market economy is built on the production and selling of real materials. Not the shuffling of non existent borrowed money between financial institutions through wire transfers that make the books look good for the short term.
Unless this country starts to meet the definition of a market economy using sound economic principals, and stops the buying, selling and transferring of swapped, indexed, financialized, monetized, and securitized phantom debt, we are all going no where.
Jay Dratler Jr. 19 hours ago
“The operating environment is unlikely to change any time soon, and we see shareholders of challenged banks becoming more demanding in asking management teams to lay out a path to unlocking value in the near term."
Would you invest your own money with anyone who would compose (for publication!) a sentence like that? I wouldn't. If you want proof positive that the "Masters of the Universe" are such because of unprecedented political influence, not brains, just read it again. The worst PR hack or aging pol couldn't write such mush.
A couple of years before the Crash of 2008, which bankers caused, the finance sector in the US gobbled up 41% of all US business profits, in all sectors. Like a terminal economic cancer, that travesty of an economy was and is unsustainable. Banks' profits, revenue and gambling have to come down if our economy is to survive, let alone become competitive. Welcome to reality.
The "horrible regulation" of which bankers speak was just a recognition of that reality: bankers must be brought to heel for destroying an otherwise smoothly functioning global industrial economy, and to insure our national economic survival. While the presidential candidates trade blame, just remember one simple fact. National unemployment was around 5% before the Crash.
Rather that impose weak regulations that bankers can circumvent, it would be far better to break the big ones up and bring in investors and new management, thereby instilling some discipline, customer service and competitiveness (i.e., *real* capitalism, not corporate welfare) in them. But they're resisting that most sensible, structural solution with all their considerable financial power and political influence. The fact that they complain even about weak regulation, which may not even forestall another crash, is the height of hubris.
en Nippon 13 hours ago
The earlier big banks are forced to get out of "trading" (really it is punting) with depositors and shareholders money, where the "traders" (gamblers) take big bonuses for profits when they get lucky, but force all loses on shareholders and depositors, the better it will be for the global society, especially Western and even more the US society, to progress to a truly egalitarian society, with a reward system based on real contribution to their company, shareholders, and society, rather than from merely getting lucky at punting. Time to force the large banks to be broken up; time for Glass Steagel to be brought back, time for return to real banking, rather than the cancerous disease of fixed income, equities, derivatives, commodities and currencies trading. Banks themselves will never do it, unless they have a CEO like the incoming Barclays CEO, with background in real banking rather than punting.
You can read the article and other comments here
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