Looks like the world has gone completely nuts… If ANYONE has watched Hank Paulson testify before congress you have to have come away with picking your jaw off the ground. The audacity and the duplicity are a wonder to behold… Even more remarkable is the fact that this was the largest bank heist in the history of the universe and it appears that his crew have successfully pulled it off because there is no one to stop them… Why would anyone believe them in the first place… Suppose we had no one to trust… Walter was old and now he’s gone. But its just as incredible to believe eveyone got suckered by these guys. Came across this clip on Bill Moyer’s Journal “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.”
Bail-out is the biggest bank heist ever | Opinion | The First Post
By Philip Delves Broughton
FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 6, 2008With every passing day of economic woe, the scale of the heist just perpetrated against America’s taxpayers by the country’s largest banks becomes more apparent.
In the shadow of the presidential election, the nine biggest banks were given $125bn of taxpayer money with the understanding they would send this fresh capital coursing into the economy in the form of loans. It was a plan inspired by Gordon Brown’s decision to recapitalise Britain’s main banks.
Unfortunately, the US government forgot to get the lending requirement in writing. Instead, the banks are sitting on the money, earning interest and mulling mergers and acquisitions and replenishing bonus pools for their employees.
A stinging letter from Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers and a bullhorn from traditional American industry, to Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs banker-turned-Treasury Secretary, is now in wide circulation and its contents should have Wall Street barricading its doors.
Hank Paulson spent $10bn on a stake in Goldman Sachs worth only $5bnGerard makes several devastating points. The first is that the Treasury grossly overpaid for the stakes it has taken in these nine major banks. Twenty days before Paulson invested $10bn in Goldman Sachs, the investor Warren Buffett invested $5bn for a stake of equal value. Thus Paulson paid twice as much as he should have to his old employer.
This pattern, Gerard argues, was repeated across the board. Again and again the Treasury paid double what it should have, giving away half of its investment as a gift to shareholders. “This is no different than if you paid me $10,000 for a car for which no one else would pay more than $5,000,” Gerard wrote. “If this deal is the model for how you intend to spend the whole $700bn that you got from Congress, then it would appear that you intend to reward the institutions that have driven our nation, and now it appears the whole world, into its most serious economic crisis in 75 years, with a gift of $350bn from the American taxpayers, who have watched 760,000 of their jobs disappear over just the past nine months.”
The word is spreading, and Paulson did not help himself with beads of sweat on his forehead one is transported back to a much more innocent time but then Nixon just bugged the Democratic Headquarters… Not like he walked away with Fort Knox. These guys wired tapped every phone on the planet and walked away with a booty tens times that of the Federal Gold Repository. Interesting piece in the Rolling Stone on just how they did it!
The Great American Bubble Machine | Corrente
* goldman sachs
From Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.
Fri, 06/26/2009 – 10:53pm — lambert[Goldman Sachs fans might also like today's post on how 32 megs of Goldman Sachs proprietary trade code got uploaded to a German server. Researchers should also note the links at the bottom of this post, which lead to a table of contents that organizes all our contemporaneous posts on The Big FAIL (the current financial crisis) as it unfolded, going back to pre-TARP days. Note also the Goldman Sachs tag above. --lambert]
Here’s the Matt Taibbi’s article on how Goldman-Sachs helped bring about and profit from our current financial crisis, “The Big FAIL”, found at Something Awful (via LOLfed). Despite the weapons-grade snark in the first paragraph, which I underlined, it’s a Big Picture post, very analytical, and has a hypothesis of what is to come that we can test for. So I recommend you read the whole thing, even though it is quite long.
Inside The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone
In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on “the Wall Street Bubble Mafia” — investment bank Goldman Sachs (click here to read the whole story). The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi’s piece is “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories” and a spokesman adding, “We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good.” Taibbi shot back: “Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it.” Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi’s piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.
Matt Taibbi On Goldman Sachs’ Big Scam
From Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
As we stand upon the 40th anniversary of what is perhaps mankind’s greatest adventure its good and fitting to remember Walter Cronkite was there then and that’s the way it was. God speed! Looking back its hard to believe we came this far to fall in a black hole as deep as the moon courtesy of the supercollider Goldman Sachs Super Bubble Machine. Smells like burnt toast.
