tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5724181159639068489.post5414536423973908406..comments2023-11-05T05:09:14.089-05:00Comments on Goldman Sachs: Information, Comments, Opinions and Facts: THE BATTLE OF THE TITANS: JPMORGAN VS. GOLDMAN SACHS...RobertMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03960912417983904202noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5724181159639068489.post-82262604775714318832010-02-02T14:53:00.968-05:002010-02-02T14:53:00.968-05:00Listen to Barry Ritholtz
starts 14 minutes into v...Listen to Barry Ritholtz <br />starts 14 minutes into video...best I have ever seen him..quite frank unlike the bs on cnbc<br /><br />http://bit.ly/aZDmj6<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpePec6cMFk&feature=player_embeddedAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5724181159639068489.post-73475432955937047052010-02-02T12:59:36.680-05:002010-02-02T12:59:36.680-05:00Democrats Say "Bye" to Populist Option
O...Democrats Say "Bye" to Populist Option<br />Obama's Junk Economics <br /><br /><br />The $13 trillion that has created a new power elite was just an incidental byproduct. Unpleasant, perhaps, as American democracy slips into oligarchy. But the least bad option. People might not like it, but Main Street simply cannot prosper without creating hundreds of Wall Street billionaires – without enabling them to increase their bonuses and capital gains as bank stock prices quadruple. It’s all to get credit flowing again (at 30 per cent for credit card users, to be sure.)<br /><br /><br />Instead of helping debtors, Obama has moved to heal the creditors, at public expense. If debtors cannot pay, the Treasury and Fed will take their IOUs and bad casino gambles onto the public sector’s balance sheet. The financial winners must come first – and it seems second and third, too. The rationale is that unless the government gives the large financial institutions what they want and saves them from taking a loss, their “incentive” to protect the economy from devastation will be gone.<br /><br />Testifying Wednesday morning as a run-up to Pres. Obama’s evening speech, Messrs. Geithner and Paulson at least avoided the Washington ploy of emulating Alzheimer’s patients and saying that they couldn’t recall anything about their giveaways. Sophisticated enough to outplay their questioners in verbal tennis, the past and present Treasury Secretaries brazened it out. Using the Plausible Deniability defense, they claimed that they weren’t even in the loop when it came to paying AIG enough to turn around and pay Goldman Sachs and other arbitrageurs 100 cents on the dollar for securities worth about a fifth as much. Their underlings did it. “This was a Federal Reserve loan,” Paulson explained. “They had the authority. They had the technical expertise … and I was working on many other things which were in my bailiwick.” And in any case an AIG bankruptcy “would have buckled our financial system and wrought economic havoc.” Unemployment, he warned, “could have risen to 25 per cent.” The Fed had to protect people.<br /><br />There are a number of problems with this story, the editorial explained. First of all, Goldman Sachs and other counterparties unilaterally said the prices had declined for securities that had no market price at all, only subjective valuations. A.I.G. would have been reasonable in disputing this. In any event, as the firm’s new 80 per cent stockholder, the U.S. Government said it would stand behind AIG. This should have removed fears of non-payment. But most important of all was the claim by Messrs. Paulson and Geithner that failure to “honor” AIG’s swaps would have threatened its far-flung insurance businesses on which so many American consumers depended. New York Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo, who was AIG’s principal insurance regulator at the time, testified before the Senate last year that these operations were not threatened at all! “‘The main reason why the federal government decided to rescue AIG was not because of its insurance companies.’ He was so confident in the health of the AIG subsidiaries that, before the federal bailout, he was working on a plan to transfer $20 billion of their excess reserves to the parent company.”<br />http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson02012010.htmlAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5724181159639068489.post-29388910192036199662010-02-01T22:23:38.792-05:002010-02-01T22:23:38.792-05:00Apparently when the 100% payout was finalized, som...Apparently when the 100% payout was finalized, some pissed-off AIG guys saw some Goldman guys high-fiving each other, ecstatic about the deal.<br /><br />for the record:...listen<br /><br /><br />http://www.bearishnews.com/post/3070Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5724181159639068489.post-49485406668625959312010-02-01T17:40:58.509-05:002010-02-01T17:40:58.509-05:00'Both sides are Illuminists'
Is that mean...'Both sides are Illuminists'<br /><br />Is that meant to be taken as a joke, or is it a serious quote?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com