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And they state they were in no danger of failing.but took the money anyway...
Quote:
It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.
Inside The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/inside_the_great_american_bubble_machine/4 - broken link)
Insanely successful?
They profit 97 times out of a 100....
They have former employees either scattered throughout the fedgov. or advising it....
your own NYT link sheds light on this for you. yes, they are insanely successful. Former GS traders/financiers in the government doesnt mean anything special is being done for GS: show me anything that says there is.
I think a lot of these people are just parasites. Products and services are created, and the end user/consumer buys them. These people jump into the middle, in between the producers and consumers, and they jack up prices, sell short, wheel and deal, and make a lot of money without having to produce anything themselves, and sometimes they cause a lot of damage and economic strife before we consumers are even able to touch the product.
GS is a fine example of Crony Capitalism in action.
BTW - If I sell a rusted clunker, by giving it cheap paint job and not telling the customer about the real condition of the car, I am committing a fraud. So is a bank when they hide worthless assets behind a fancy cover. That, IMHO, is also a fraud.
We need a criminal investigation of an entire industry. Unfortunately, I doubt if that will ever happen because we do not have politicians, or financiers, that really respect the Law.
Wow Taxpayers earned 23% interest on the $3B it loaned just to Goldman Sachs? Calculating that out thats $690 million....what did the government do with that money?
Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
if you were the govt wouldnt you rather have former employees who understand big finance working on your side?
I think hiring people who were involved in the whole corrupt mess stinks to high heaven,especially given how much money GS has given to the Dems....
You seem to think that bankers are being altruistic in their dealings for some reason....
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Aren't a LOT of people involved on the fedgov. side of things former Goldman Sachs employees????
