Goldman Sachs Has Already Cannibalized the Economy

Two articles have very different views of what Goldman Sachs stands for. 

How Goldman Sachs sees itself as

--an "enduring brand;"
--the best investment company;
--highly rated;
--"our clients' interests always come first;"
--"a set of core values;"
--a match between cultures and behaviors;
--self-renewing;
--"greedy, but long-term greedy;"
--now "greedy, but short-term greedy"  (i.e., greedy all the time!)

How we see Goldman Sachs

--predatory;
--parasitical;
--casino capitalists;
--crooked;
--too big to jail; too big to fail;
--fraudulent;
--criminal;
--high rollers;
--screwer of public sector;
--financial oligarchs;
--funder of corporate raiders;
-- supporter of takeover artists;
--gamblers;
--a rip-off of the system

So you see two things: the propaganda that Goldman Sachs believes and the truth that Michael Hudson and we see.

Too Big To Jail?
By Michael Hudson - Blog
. . . .
Instead of the cartoons that textbooks draw to describe banking under industrial capitalism, we have got something quite different. In the textbook fairy tale, the banker loans money to the industrialist to build a factory. Happy workers are coming in, and deposit their paychecks as savings to make yet more loans to expand the economy.

But what actually is happening today is that Wall Street organizes the sale of high-interest junk bonds to raise money for corporate raiders. The takeover artist buys a factory that’s already there, lays off half the labor force, works the remainder more intensively, takes the pension fund for himself, or uses the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) to buy up the company’s stock, so as to raise the price at which he can exercise the stock options he gives himself.

He replaces defined pension benefits with a defined contribution plan, in which all the employees know is how much is docked from their paycheck every month, not what they are going to get after they retire. The role of this kind of “investment banking” is predatory. It makes money from debt-leveraged buyouts, takeover loans, and gambling on which way interest rates or currencies will move.

The effect of this non-industrial superstructure of credit and debt is to shrink employment, worsen working conditions, and downsize pension obligations. Wall Street economists call this “wealth creation,” by which they mean that wealth is being sucked up to the top 1% of the economic pyramid. When they talk about wealth creation, they mean the wealth to this 1 percent, not prosperity for the 99%.]

See the video and the transcript here