One Can Only Hope That Goldman Sachs Would Vaporize!

We all now know that no executive of a bank will ever be investigated or prosecuted for the accounting control frauds he committed that resulted in the financial crisis of 2008.  Human beings have a craving for justice to be rendered to those who commit fraud and especially to those who have become super-rich by poaching the savings and pensions of others.  The human mind is fully capable of making up a recipe to remedy that injustice.

Take, for example, the story from Norse mythology about the father who decided to divide his sons' shares of his inheritance by the amount of gold each son could hold in his mouth (from The Globe and Mail, Saturday, May 11, 2013, p. R12).  Gold as a "mouth-tale" is an effective metaphor and suits our fantastical purposes.

We are often told by the world of commerce that we are all "consumers" no matter what we buy even if it is not digestible as food:  we consume resources; we consume products; we consume wealth--all very involved with the mouth and its greedy ingestion of "things." 

What better way for the gods to reiterate their rating of Goldman's value (long-term avoid) than by how much gold Blankfein can literally hold in his mouth and consume!  What better way to depict the character of Blankfein than by his "consuming his own gold."   

A yearly salary of $21 million for 2012 is a lot of gold to "mouth!"

Thus the fantasy world, where there is justice, metes out the painful digestion of justice on those who deserve it. 

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The Economist has written an article which could have come directly from Goldman Sachs's speechwriter and must be taken with a pinch of salt:  One has to take exception to Goldman being force-fed capital when it was really bailed out by the Federal Reserve and Buffet.  Investment banks are not the most important institutions in banking although commercial banks may be.  Debts were not written down but were put off the balance sheet where they remained unseen.  Quantitative Easing over many months is the main reason that the stock market has been juiced up and thus helped the banks make huge profits. 

When banks make huge profits and give their executives huge salaries and bonuses and when finance  controls more than 40% of the economy, that is an indication that the rest of the economy, especially the workers, are not doing so well.

Some articles, such as the one below, should not be written and certainly should not be read as bearing any relationship to the truth.

Wall Street is back
By The Economist
. . . .
“Lose Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs would be next in line—if they fell the financial system might vaporise.”

Do not bother to read this article here