Goldman, Goldman, and Goldman

[SineSwiper]

The Great American Bubble Machine

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

[Mental]

Yes. Wall Street has become a cancer. The problem is, the cancer is at the heart of the financial system, so if you go after the cancer too aggressively, the heart might die along with it.

The problem is that these firms ARE too big and have their fingers in too many pies to fail without tearing down the entire world economy along with them. So, we have the bailouts, because otherwise everybody goes broke. They need to be broken up. I've been a big fan of the idea of using antitrust legislation against these banks for some time.

[Tessian]

2 things:

1) Goldman Sachs repaid their TARP bailout with interest: http://www.cnbc.com/id/32085279/site/14081545

2) As much as I wanted to, I couldn't stomach reading this article... since when did Rolling Stone become the liberal version of Fox News?? There's so much bias dripping from every sentence my floor's all wet and it's pretty disgusting. You lose all your integrity as a writer / journalist (and a stretch at that) when you start referring to people as assholes and douchebags.

Comeon Sine, seriously??

[SineSwiper]

1) Goldman Sachs repaid their TARP bailout with interest: http://www.cnbc.com/id/32085279/site/14081545

Well, they didn't really need it much, anyway. Also, the record profits are from making a fucking KILLING from underdraft fees. Let me rephrase that: the banks are making money from people who don't have enough money. It used to be that investments were their biggest source of income, but not anymore.

2) As much as I wanted to, I couldn't stomach reading this article... since when did Rolling Stone become the liberal version of Fox News?? There's so much bias dripping from every sentence my floor's all wet and it's pretty disgusting. You lose all your integrity as a writer / journalist (and a stretch at that) when you start referring to people as assholes and douchebags.

Where the fuck have you been? Hunter Thompson. Cameron Crowe. Joe Klein. Joe Eszterhas. Patti Smith. P. J. O'Rourke. The Rolling Stone has a rich history of eccentric and accomplished writers.

Also, I tend to prescribe to Hunter's ideal that there is no such thing as a lack of bias in newspapers. All news is bias. Some people choose to hide it. Some people don't.

Besides, look at the quote: "asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding"

Doesn't that define an asshole? I think the use of the word is pretty justified.

[Kupek]

There's a difference between not hiding your bias, and peppering your sentences with value judgments.

[Mental]

Rolling Stone has been an ultraliberal beacon for some time. The bias and language are definitely there. That being said, I still think Wall Street pursues plenty of policies that are bad for the world. Sachs repaid the TARP money, great, that's fine. But you also have banks that are raising interest rates so much that it ought to be illegal, like in Anarky's post the other day, and because of the repeal of Glass-Steagal the credit card lending banks and the investment banks have all gummed together financially. I think that we need a return of some of our pre-1999 usury laws and a breakup of a lot of financial entities that are "too big to fail", i.e., AIG and Citigroup, for instance.

[Oracle]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/15/ ... newssearch

Goldman Sachs basically sat pretty because all of the money that other institutions like AIG owed them was paid back, 100 cents on the dollar, due to TARP funds.

From the url:

The bailout of American International Group, or AIG, ballooned from $85 billion in September 2008 to $182.5 billion. Of that money, $90 billion was funneled as collateral payments to banks that traded with AIG. American taxpayers may never see a dime of their bailout money again, but Goldman saw plenty.

Goldman may be the largest indirect beneficiary of AIG's bailout, receiving $12.9 billion in collateral, including securities lending transactions, from AIG after the government bailed out the insurance company