The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone »
Posted By deathray 4 months, 1 week ago in Business & FinanceMatt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression
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deathray
Hm...summarizing a life...Investment banker, sailor, unintentional gourmet cook. Ex US Naval officer, also Foreign Service. Split my time between NYC and Miami Beach ...
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deathray4 months, 1 week ago
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here's taibbi's take on this issue, and in typical taibbi fashion, he's pretty graphic with the vampire parasite imagery.
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fta:
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.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. -
doggammitComment removed: Retracted by user
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deathray4 months, 1 week ago
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taibbi makes the claim that the incestuous relationship between goldman and policy makers in the treasury department tends to favor goldman more than it does the citizens of the us; it's almost as though there is more loyalty to the firm than there is to the people they are supposed to be representing.
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deathray4 months, 1 week ago
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well, yes, and no.
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in order to get things done quickly, it's important for the government to be able to have a relationship with the private sector...now, if for whatever reason the private firm structures the deal to it's undue benefit because of inside information, that's capitalism, but not necessarily in the best interest of the government or the people.
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deathray4 months, 1 week ago
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goldmanites in government and banking, and how the old boy network works:
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fta:
The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. 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 ******* 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 multibillion-dollar 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 golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. 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 bailed-out 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.
But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind. -
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fsev414 months, 1 week ago
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The intertwining of executives and boards of major corporations and government is frightening but somewhat inevitable. You can't put a race horse breeder in charge of emergency planning and expect good results.
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Strong competition is essential to a functioning capitalistic system but with global mega conglomerates that control industries competition disappears. When Wal-Mart can specify what, when, where and how to deliver a product a supplier wants to sell (and price too) competition becomes very difficult. Bigger may be cheaper but it is not necessarily good for the majority.-
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Natureboy4 months, 1 week ago
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This is the inherent paradox of capitalism.
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competition = downward pressure on prices. Therefore, competition is less lucrative and businesses work to eliminate it. Ultimately, you may or may not have true monopoly, but you are guaranteed to have a shared monopoly or oligolopoly that behaves much like a monopoly.
At that point, you have something that very much serves its own interests and not the interests of the citizenry. Solutions are either government regulation from without, or government acquisition and direct control (socialism.)
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Progressive4 months, 1 week ago
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FTA:
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There's John Thain, the ******* 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 multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company.
As a Merrill Lynch alum, I would add that Don Regan, Treasury Secretary and Chief of Staff to Ronald Reagan, merits dishonorable mention as well. -
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AnteUp4 months, 1 week ago
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So, I compliment you, deathray, for sharing this great piece -
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but since I whole-heartedly believe that my calls to my Congressman and Senators are fairly useless unless I am TOO
BIG TO FAIL..........and I think that the same is true for 90%
of the American constituency - just what is the plan if we have
any desire to regain a fair and just Democracy?
Do you think it is even possible?-
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tchef4 months, 1 week ago
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You can't give up on your own influence. Though is seems like your letter or vote makes no difference, it does. Yours, plus others who share your opinion when added together will command attention. So call, write, write letters to the editor, keep up your action. They want you to give up, that gives them all the power.
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simonsez4 months, 1 week ago
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It only shows that it's not individual parties we have to be concerned with, it's both parties that have sold us down the road for many years. It's a game they play pretending to fight each other when it's actually us they are battering.
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doggammitComment removed: Retracted by user
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wtroiano4 months ago
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Best piece I've seen on the subject. Now tell me the connection between Goldman Sachs and people like George Soros, Obama, Biden, Gore, Reid, Pelosi, Dodd, Daschle (sound like reindeer...), the Kennedy family, Barbra Streisand, and the Jacksons
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Carolyn Troiano
politicat@verizon.net
http://examiner.com/x-13822-Chesterfield-County-Co...
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