Goldman Sachs Lack of Remorse Says It All

Alrighty folks,

Goldman Sachs makes me want to throw the hell up. I despise them. I continually ask myself "How does Goldman have the nerve to report record profits after being saved by the taxpayer".

Lets get one thing straight: Goldman was SAVED by the taxpayer. IT FAILED! Without a taxpayer bailout, this firm would be out of business.

In fact, they still have enough level 3 assets on their books to still possibly wipe them out. However, with no mark to market accounting rules, the firm is allowed to mark their worthless securitization assets at 100 cents on the dollar. Meanwhile back here on earth, we all know these assets are worth far less, perhaps pennies on the dollar.

IMO, any profits made by these parasites should be sent directly to the taxpayer until they pay back the AIG gift that they received from us. I mean yes they paid back the TARP, but WHAT ABOUT THE $13 BILLION DOLLAR TAXPAYER DONATION THAT WAS MADE TO GOLDMAN IN THE FORM OF COVERING AIG'S BAD BETS VIA CDS SWAPS?

How are these cockroaches allowed to pay themselves disgusting bonuses after stealing so much money from the taxpayers? The arrogance of this firm is BEYOND BELIEF!

The fact that Goldman lavished themselves with million dollar bonuses within a year of being saved by the taxpayer as the rest of America suffers in a depression is unfathonable in my opinion.

I want this firm to die. Parasites are no good in any form. This firm would have failed if it wasn't for their connections in Washington.

Goldman needs to be humble as the rest of America suffers. The fact that they are out gloating about their earnings says a lot about them as people.

As far as I am concerned they can rot in hell. PAYBACK YOUR AIG GIFT AND SHOW SOME REMORSE YOU SLIME!

Enjoy this Guardian article from the UK. The pathetic US press would never have the balls to write such a piece criticizing the kings of Wall St. Goldman was a bankrupt firm that saved themselves via their connections in the government. They were toast without them. Goldman is a joke and anyone with a brain knows it.

Enjoy the piece:

"It ought to have been a moment of triumph for Goldman Sachs, the most feared, revered and envied of Wall Street's investment banks. Long synonymous with power and wealth, the firm delivered the biggest, healthiest profit since it was established in a one-room Manhattan office by a German immigrant, Marcus Goldman, in 1869. But hunched over their computer screens from dawn until late at night, Goldman's elite bankers were unprepared for the ferocity of the looming backlash.

Over the three months to June, Goldman clocked up $3.44bn of profits, amounting to $38m a day or $1.58m an hour. Making money has suddenly become easier. Under Goldman's policy of dedicating half its revenue to staff pay, the firm's 29,400 employees can expect average take-home packages of between $700,000 and $900,000 for the year if the present level of prosperity continues.

Not everybody is impressed - far from it. In Congress, senators fulminated against the divide between two Americas: Wall Street trumpeting its return to prosperity while citizens on the high street lose jobs and homes. A leading US union, the Service Employees International Union, accused Goldman of emerging from the credit crunch "unrepentant and unreformed".
An article by writer Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine compared Goldman Sachs to a parasitic vampire squid squeezing the life out of humanity. The New York Times said that Goldman employees were known in New York as the "bandits of Broad Street".
The rightwing television host Bill O'Reilly referred to Goldman as "swine". And the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman weighed in, declaring that what the bank does is "bad for America". "Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers," wrote Krugman, pointing out that the firm made a fortune in the run-up to the financial crisis by betting on a collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market.

In Westminster, 33 MPs have signed an early day motion demanding a 90% tax on bankers' bonuses that are worth more than 15% of salary. Across the English Channel, President Nicolas Sarkozy's top adviser, Henri Guaino, declared that the bank had posed a "gigantic" moral problem: "Goldman Sachs wouldn't exist had American taxpayers not come to its aid. To be drowning in dollars and bonus money today is utterly scandalous."

Goldman's critics fall into two camps. There are those who object to the sheer scale of its profits, on the grounds that such sums can only be made by taking irresponsible risks bound to end in financial disaster. And there are those who, while welcoming its return to fiscal health, are disgusted that Goldman still insists on giving 49% of its revenue to already well-off staff. This, after all, was the bank that handed pay packets of more than $20m to 50 of its employees before the credit crunch began to bite three years ago. Why, asked former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, could Goldman not reinvest the proceeds in job-creating industries such as green energy or biotechnology?

Most galling of all is that, in the eyes of many, the money has been made with the help of the US government. In the dying days of the Bush administration, Goldman was one of nine top banks ordered by the US Treasury to accept bailout money whether they needed it or not.
Robert Borosage, president of the left-leaning Campaign for America's Future, says Goldman has been crucially bolstered by the US government's implicit message that it is too big to fail: "These guys are going back to their old games with a new sense of empowerment thanks to the Federal Reserve ultimately back-stopping them."

Within Goldman, there is disbelief at the avalanche of hatred. A spokesman describes many of the attacks on Goldman as "unjustified and hideously distorted". The bank points out that it pays a US tax rate of 31% on its earnings - so the public get a third of its profits. Its success, argues the firm, helps stimulate economic activity.

"The government and other banks want us to engage fully and provide liquidity into the markets," says Goldman's spokesman. "It seems perverse to criticise firms that have done what they're asked to do for doing what they've been asked to do."

As far as remuneration is concerned, Goldman does not consider itself a typical Wall Street employer. It recruits bright people at a young age - and it does not rely on Ivy League or Oxbridge graduates. On average, Goldman staff become partners by the age of 35 and they are quietly encouraged to leave a decade later. Many go into public office, a fact which further enrages critics, who view the succession of senior US government roles held by former Goldman staff as evidence of the bank's powerful tentacles.

Goldman sources cite another sector popular among its former employees - or "alumni", as it calls them - as evidence of the need for top-dollar bonuses. Many hedge funds and private equity firms have been established by alumni, so it is not so much the prospect of poaching by competitors that worries the bank but the allure for its employees of going it alone.
Goldman insiders feel that, perversely, the bank has been discriminated against by encouraging its staff to enter public service. It wanted to buy Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual but lost out both times to JP Morgan - partly, sources allege, because of nervousness in the Bush administration about the appearance of a deal with a bank that used to employ both the then treasury secretary Henry Paulson and President Bush's chief of staff, Josh Bolten. Just this week, Goldman acolytes wondered whether fear of a backlash prevented the Obama administration from working with Goldman on a mooted joint rescue of the struggling lender CIT Group.

Reacting to Rolling Stone's evisceration of the company, one Goldman executive jokingly pointed out this week that real vampire squid were harmless to humans. Nevertheless, the bank is caught at the trickiest of moments: its earnings have recovered, but at a grassroots level much of Europe and the US remains in recessionary misery.

The fury and disbelief at Goldman's seemingly untouchable fortunes was captured this week by Elijah Cummings, a Democratic congressman for inner-city Baltimore. At a Congressional hearing on the financial crisis, he explained: "People in my district, you know what they ask me? They say, 'Cummings, is that money that folks are getting on Wall Street, those millions and billions, is that our money? Because our money went somewhere. What about us? What about us, who can't send our kids to college in September? What about us, who don't have a house? What about us?'"