Wall Street
Thank You Business Leaders For Not Being "Mad" Anymore
Wall Street
Real Time With Bill Maher ~ October 1, 2010
Barack Obama, Broadcatching, Iraq, Politics, Wall Street
Real Time With Bill Maher | February 19, 2010 | Opening + Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Warren, Wall Street
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
Goldman Sachs, Wall Street
Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy – they’re re-creating the conditions for another crash
Posted Feb 17, 2010 5:57 AM
On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.
The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses — meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a “bailout tax” on banks. Maybe this wasn’t the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.
Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. “In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines,” he said, “I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative.”
Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we’re so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.
How Goldman Secretly Bet on the U.S. Housing Crash
Adjustable Rate Mortgages, Baba Booey, Bear Stearns, Citibank, Henry Paulson, TARP, Tim Geithner, Treasury, Wall Street, Washington MutualMcClatchy Washington Bureau
Sun, Nov. 01, 2009
Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
November 01, 2009 01:17:44 AM
WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.
Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.
Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who’s proposed a massive overhaul of the nation’s banks. “This is fraud and should be prosecuted.”
John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman’s maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.
“It would look much more damaging,” Coffee said, “if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless.”
Dylan Ratigan Breaks Down the TARP Fiasco
AIG, Bank of america, Bear Stearns, Citibank, Corporate Communists, Credit markets, Dylan Ratigan, FDIC, Federal Reserve Board, GDP, Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Neil Barofsky, TARP, Tim Geithner, Too Big to Fail, Toxic Assets, Treasury Department, Wall Street
Matt Taiibi : Naked Short-Selling Caught on Video
AIG, Bear Stearns, Citibank, Deep Capture, Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, Jim Cramer, Lehman Brothers, Matt Taibbi, Naked Short-Selling, Patrick Byrne, Stock Exchange, Wall StreetMatt Taibbi
True Slant
Caught On Tape: A Naked Swindle
Continuing with the theme of naked short-selling, I have a video that was given to me last week that will allow people to see how naked short-selling can take place.
This video is only 31 seconds long and what it shows is a day-trader trying to sell short shares in a major NYSE-traded stock. To disguise the identity of the trader, I’ve had to edit out the name of the company in question — I’ll call it BANK X for short. What I can say is that the stock in question is one of America’s largest financial companies and the recipient of an enormous amount of public bailout money, so the fact that its stock can be manipulated is something that should be a concern to everyone.
Matt Taibbi: "Wall Street's Naked Swindle"
AIG, Bear Stearns, Citi, Federal Reserve, George Bush, Henry Paulson, Lehman Brothers, Matt Taibbi, Merrill Lynch, Tim Geithner, Wall StreetThe Best of Noam Chomsky [Video]
American Hegemony, Banking, Communism, Congress, Corporatocracy, Imperialism, Iraq, Military Industrial Complex, MIT, Neocons, Noam Chomsky, Politics, Think-Tanks, Vietnam, Wall Street
The New York Herald Sun 