Sunday, July 19, 2009

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?'"

31 comments:

John Maynes said...

Jeff,

calm down, no need for throwing up. The Americans asked for it, they got it. They voted for a candidate with no political achievements whatsoever but with the shallow promise of hope and change. His campaign was financed by GS and he returned the favour by bringing in no-tax-paying GS boy Geithner as head of treasury and supporting all that back door financing, e.g. from AIG to GS. Didn't you vote for the candidate of change too? ;-)

Jeff said...

Oh I will throw up and I did not vote for Obama. I smelled a rat as soon as I saw him run for president..

He is a likeable guy and I hope he somehow is successful but his policies are pathetic. His socialistic policies are flat out frightening.

GOldman Sachs makes me want to throw up not Obama.

robbybear said...

Denninger on Goldman with Max Keiser. Denninger explains how this slimy Company basically got paid TWICE when they correctly figured out that AIG was broke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_JCKm3KsIo

Jeff said...

Robby

I heard about that interview.
Thanks for sharing.

I have had enough of this firm. I get more and more angry the more I read about how they conduct busniess.

Without fraud and politics, this firm is no better than anyone else on WAll St.

Peter said...

Jeff, what is interesting to me is that Goldman has so much trash on their books from CDOs and such that one would think they would use their profits to protect against those future losses. So why not use a couple billion of those profits to write down or create reserves against the future losses?

This is quite scary because what it tells me is that the losses are so astronomical that a couple billion is not going to make a difference. My thought is that they are just taking as much as they can before it all comes crumbling down. On the other hand, they might already know that when the sh*t hits the fan again the government is going to save them, so why spend one penny of money they can steal on something we the taxpayer are going to cover.

I also find it interesting that the left wingers like Spitzer still say such idiotic things like Goldman should use the money to create green jobs. At the end of the day these fascists can't stop telling people what to do with their money. He clearly has no problem with this theft so long as Goldman uses it for things he deems important.

As for the comments about Bobama, the man is nothing but a Manchurian Candidate. I have no respect for anyone that voted for him and still supports him. It is one thing to be conned by the campaign, a totally different thing to still believe this man represents anything but hatred for this country's past, fascism, ignorance and crony capitalism.

I pray that the people of this country stand up for themselves soon. We have a very limited time to act, if not we are going to be like Europe very, very quickly. We will have .1% of the population being the elites and the rest of us are going to be poor losers, driving a crappy little car and taking camping vacations with our one child because we can not afford anything better. The choice is ours, either we the citizens pay the price for these crimes or the criminals in charge and at Goldman pay the price.

Jeff said...

Peter

Couldn't of said it better myself.

They are extorting as much as they can before this all falls apart. I would love to see them go down hard. They need to all be in prison

Anonymous said...

Guys, why bother to care anymore? The government is corrupted and the majority of the American people are just plain gullible, ignorant and blind. Their brains are consumed by the TV. Therefore they deserve to be raped by the thieves in Wall Street and DC.

Knowing the truth, just use the knowledge to make more money. Take advantage of the system in anyway you can.

Jeff said...

Anon

I care because its wrong and many uninformed innocent people will be hurt as a result.

Its also hard to trade a market that trades based on fraud. You are forced to speculate vs trade on fundamentals .you are basically gambling in a market like this when u trade

Anonymous said...

I know you care. I used to. But now I feel it is just pointless. Unless the investors live in cave for years, they should clearly see that the economy is very sicked. Home values are still dropping. Personal credit line (CC and HELOC) are dwindling. Businesses are slowed. Employees are being laid off.

So how can they believe on the "green" shoots? All I see are "brown" shoots.

Jeff said...

Anon

I hear ya.

They don't see the brown shoots because they are oblivious to it.

Most people don't pay attention to this stuff like we do.

Most have never even heard of green shoots. They talk to their broker once a year usually after the market tanks.

The fact that we are so clueless around our investments is amazing to me. Its one of the most important things in our lives and yet for the most part Americans spend no time trying to stay up to date on their nest eggs.

Herb said...

Its also hard to trade a market that trades based on fraud. You are forced to speculate vs trade on fundamentals .you are basically gambling in a market like this when u trade

Trading is nothing more than gambling right now unless you are Goldman. Goldman knows the dealers hole cards.

Jeff said...

Snood

Totally agree

Futures are up again tonight.

It's just unbelievable how the market continues to rise as Rome burns.

Its pure insanity. I have seen a lot of bears get wiped out on this move.

I wouldn't touch this market with a 10 foot pole right now.

Anonymous said...

yet another day and nothing happened... everything is honkie-dorie... no blowout because of the bonds, rates, etc... just sideways market with possibility of running higher...

Peter said...

Jeff, I think that things are going to take longer than we think but when they happen they will happen very quickly. It's just that this is a psychology game, the economy/market is a herd mentality and right now the herd is being brainwashed into seeing and hearing no evil. It is the herd that is being manipulated that is propelling this market and it will continue until it stops.

For example, look at 2008, if you bought the market at the end of Jan and sold in mid August you would have made a profit. Can you believe that, as horrible as it was for the year all the downside was in a short two month time frame. Throughout 2008 we were told it was fine, the herb bought it, then when the herd finally bathed in reality everything was undone in just a matter of weeks.

The problem I see for us "realists" is that we see and understand what is happening, but it is meaningless in terms of the market until the herd sees it. How many people saw this housing crisis coming in 2005-06 but it was not until late 2007 that the market even budged downwards.

To us it is clear what is going to happen in this country, the only real question is when the herd and manipulators will have no choice but to admit it.

Jeff said...

I agree guys

I think something really bad has to happen in order for the herd to wake up.

A large bank failure perhaps?

Bond market dislocation?

I think its too late to jump in on the long side. Who knows? Maybe we run over 1000 on the S&P.

Jeff said...

Great

TARP regulator just came out and said there is $23 trillion in debt amongts our financial syste,

WTF. YOu have got to be kidding me!

Jeff said...

oops typo above

$23 trillion in debt that must be cleared.

Herb said...

$23 trillion is nothing a little hyperinflation can't cure.

John Maynes said...

$23tn? Ah, now we are talking real money!!! ;-)

What a bunch of asswipes America has become! Outrageous!!! And the market seems not to bother at all!!! The bulls love it. :-)

Jeff said...

Unreal

The unstoppable bounce!

Peter said...

$23 trillion is nothing that Bobama can't handle. Actually, I don't think he is smart enough to figure out how many zeros are in a trillion. This of course is the guy who thinks they speak Austrian in Austria and the stocks are a buy because their "prices and earnings ratios" are low. Is it possible that we have a President that is so stupid he has no clue what a P/E ratio is? Oh wait, he is a genius, he went to Columbia and Harvard. Yes, he is Wiley Coyote "super genius."

Herb said...

They speak Austrian German in Austria (different from High German), so that is not really a mistake.

Peter said...

Snood, I speak "High" English all the time, especially around 4:20, but no one would confuse that for its own language. That's like saying Argentinians and Spanish or Scots and Brits speak different languages.

The guy meant what he said, don't make excuses. There is no reason for him to know that Austrians speak German because he is a moron. The only people left supporting this clown after 6 months are the avowed collectivists and those who would rather kill themselves than admit they made a mistake and were conned by the king of con artists.

Don't get me wrong, I did not vote for the Idiot McCain either. Both parties are douches. The sooner every real American comes to that conclusion the sooner we can get rid of them all and reinstate our Constitution.

Health care is not a right, bearing arms is!

Jeff said...

Peter

YOu are on a tear tonight!

You sound as frustrated as I do when it comes to all of this crazy BS.

I may have a post up later.

We are having trouble with high speed internet in my area today.

If I can get one up it will be short.

EconomicDisconnect said...

How about that wild forcast by the Goldman crew today? S&P earnings going to double in 2010?? Ok.

Jeff said...

Get

Yeah

Sold to them.

Why do I have this feeling that Goldman wants the hell out of this market.

I bet they will sell into one last pump.

What slime.

EconomicDisconnect said...

Jeff,
my sentiments exactly and I speeld it out in tonights post. Those guys are either very brave or unreal stupid. I vote the latter.

Herb said...

Peter, I take it you have not been to Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. There is a difference.

In fact, Austrian German is recognized and protected under EU law (under the sinister sounding “Protocol no. 10”).

Jeff said...

Get

Yeah that call seemed very desperate to me.

I think the green shoots are browning and they realize its time to get the hell outta dodge.

Lots of bad earnings today. I will be back tomorrow with a post.

Futes a whopping -3..lol

Lets see if the street can muster up some more bullshit and take this market higher tomorrow.

Its almost comical at this point.

I find the move in Gold to be very interesting. China and the ROW are loosing confidence in the dollar IMO.

There are so many things that could take down the market.

Bernanke's testimony is one of them. He better have an exit strategy. I don't think he knows what the hell to do at this point. It seems like he is just winging it right now.

Tempted to start buying some PUTS, but I may wait until this puppy breaks 1000.

EconomicDisconnect said...

I am very biased via precious metals, but....

This whole show of fiat money is going to end, and badly. Whether this week, next month, or next year I have no idea. Any prudent investor must consider a 5% (I argue for 10%) in gold and or silver preferably in physical holdings just in case. My 2 cents.

Jeff said...

I love silver too.

I am over 10% on by metals hedges.

I still think short term deflation is a serious risk. Long term, its a no brainer that inflation will become a nightmare.