05-03-2010, 12:33 PM
SEIZE AND LIQUIDATE GOLDMAN SACHS
Webster G. Tarpley
http://tarpley.net/2010/04/27/seize-and-...man-sachs/
Today’s Senate hearings, carried on CNBC, Bloomberg, and C-SPAN, represent the first major exposure of the American people to the scandalous frauds of the derivatives casino, including synthetic collateralized debt obligations (synthetic CDOs or CDO²). These are things most people have heard very little about. They begin to open up the shocking reality behind such shopworn euphemisms like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and “troubled assets.” Reactionaries in general and Republicans in particular have done everything possible to hide the role of derivatives, which must be considered the main cause of the financial panic of September 2008 which brought down Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG, after felling Bear Stearns in March of the same year. The reactionary legend, repeated yesterday on the Senate floor by financier minion GOP Sen. Gregg of New Hampshire, is that the crisis was caused by poor people taking out subprime mortgages and then defaulting, bringing down the entire Anglo-American banking system and triggering the bailouts. Either that, or too much government spending was too blame.
A mass of kited derivatives blew up in September 2008
This Big Lie has come from such propaganda sources as the Limbaugh Institute of Retarded Reactionary Ranting. But the $1.5 trillion in subprime mortgages were dwarfed by the $15 trillion US residential real estate market, to say nothing of the $1.5 thousand trillion world derivatives bubble. But, starting with Bush-Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the talk has been of a “housing correction,” not a derivatives panic. It must be pointed out that derivatives are nothing but wagers, bets placed from a distance on securities which themselves are often not mortgages, but rather other derivatives. The bettor buying a synthetic CDO or CDO² does not own the underlying mortgages or mortgage-backed securities, any more than someone who bets on a racehorse owns part of the horse. Blankfein and others tried to portray derivatives as a service to hedgers and end-users, but it’s clear that the vast majority of derivatives involve neither hedgers nor users, but only bettors on both side of the transaction. It is in any case this mass of kited derivatives which blew up in 2008, bringing on the present world economic depression.
Goldman Sachs executives are babbling cretins
The mystique of Goldman Sachs is based in large part on their reputation as the smartest financiers on Wall Street. After today’s hearings, this mystique has permanently dissipated. The Goldman executives babbled. They sounded dumb. They stalled and stammered and went into contortions to avoid giving straight answers to simple questions. They were mendacious and evasive when they did speak. Financial powers around the world will note carefully the refusal of three out of four Goldman executives on one panel to state that they had a duty to defend the interests of their clients. Who will want to do business with such a gang? Goldman Sachs got $10 billion of taxpayer money in low-interest loans under the Bush-Paulson TARP. Part of that money went to pay for obscene bonuses for Goldman executives like the ones on display today. The argument for bonuses is that they must be paid to retain the highly talented personnel, virtual geniuses, who are indispensable for Wall Street speculative success. But these are no geniuses, they are imbeciles. No more bonuses should be paid by banks saved through public money.
Don’t buy any used cars from Lloyd Blankfein
Sleaziest of all was Goldman’s risk-monger in chief, Lloyd Blankfein, who pretended not to know that derivatives are often kept hidden off balance sheet. The morally insane Blankfein testified that his role was to provide the firm’s clients with “the risk they wanted.” Other GS witnesses represented the firm’s role as “distributing risk.” But it turned out that they were manufacturing risk through the very existence and activities of Goldman Sachs, which had the result of pyramiding the total risk of the US financial system into intergalactic space. It is time to regulate much of that unbearable risk out of existence with appropriate regulatory legislation. In the meantime, no sane person would buy a used car from Blankfein. Nor should they believe his assurance that the “recession” has ended.
But when at the end of the day Blankfein finally suggested to Sen. Tester that synthetic CDOs might be outlawed, we should accept his proposal immediately.
Today’s hearings reveal the Goldman Sachs gunslingers and whiz kids as ignorant gangsters and con artists, notable only for their ability to practice massive fraud with impudence. These sleazy mediocrities do not deserve bonuses paid for by taxpayers. Rather, it is time to shut them down and put them in the dock.
If Goldman Sachs had cared about is clients, it would have urgently warned them to unload their subprime risk by late 2006 or thereabouts. Instead, Goldman was busily increasing its clients’ risk by selling them more toxic CDOs out of its own inventory warehouse.
Goldman Sachs: bookies who stack the deck and fix the games
As the philandering Sen. Ensign pointed out, comparing Wall Street to Las Vegas is a slander on the croupiers of Las Vegas, where everyone knows or should know that the game is rigged so that the house always wins. To use the comparison introduced by Sen. McCaskill, Goldman Sachs was operating as the gambling house, or the bookie. At the same time, Goldman was betting for their own account. But much worse was the fact that Goldman was stacking the decks, loading the dice, fixing the games on which the bets were placed, and bribing the umpires.
As Ensign put it in a rare moment of lucidity, the subprime mortgage was bad. But the collapse of subprime would not have had anything like its actual destructive effect on the US economy if it had not been compounded by the mass of synthetic derivatives that were piled on top of subprime.
No national or social purpose served by Goldman Sachs and toxic derivatives bets
The broader issue raised by today’s hearing is: what human purpose is served by the existence of Goldman Sachs, which concocts toxic synthetic CDOs for the purpose of allowing speculators, who are often lied to and duped, to bet for or against them. Goldman Sachs can only be described as a speculative parasite which promotes the activities of other speculative parasites, such as the John Paulson hedge fund at the expense of the public and of its other clients. It was a crime to inject $10 billion of Treasury money into Goldman Sachs. It was another crime for the Fed to lend Goldman untold billions (just how many billions Bernanke still refuses to disclose) to keep them afloat and enable more predatory profits. These crimes must stop, and the public money must be clawed back. Most important, it is time to shut down the derivatives rackets.
Goldman got $12.5 billion from taxpayers for AIG credit default swaps
Useful questions from GOP Sen. Coburn pointed to another kind of derivative: the infamous credit default swap (CDS). These CDS are what brought down AIG, whose London hedge fund had issues $3 trillion in derivatives. When the government bailed out AIG, part of that $180 billion of taxpayer money was used for payouts to the CDS counterparties of AIG, biggest among them Goldman, which got $12.5 billion from the US taxpayer. That was 100 cents on the dollar on a mass of toxic CDS. Coburn wanted to know why Goldman got all their money back, while GM bondholders took a bath as GM went bankrupt. That was, of course, a matter of Goldman’s political clout through GS alum Henry Paulson and Obama Car Czar Steve “The Rat” Rattner, backed up by the historic preponderance of finance capital over industrial capital in this country since Andrew Carnegie sold out to JP Morgan over a century ago.
Derivatives and zombie banks: the toll
Thanks to Goldman Sachs, the other Wall Street zombie banks, and their derivatives, the financial panic of 2008 has turned into a world economic depression of unimaginable proportions. The unemployed and underemployed in the US alone are surely in excess of 20 million. Five to six million home foreclosures are already done or in the pipeline, throwing tens of millions of Americans out of their homes. World trade has been seriously impacted. The budgets of California, New York, Illinois, and many other states are in crisis, with massive layoffs of teachers and other state employees. An entire generation is being destroyed. Now, Greek bonds are trading at junk levels under the attack of speculative predators including Soros, Greenlight Capital, SAC, and the protagonists of today’s hearings – Paulson and Co and Goldman Sachs itself. The attack on Greece and the euro represents the leading edge of the second wave of the depression, which is now arriving in much the same way that the second wave of the 1930s depression was unleashed by the Vienna Kreditanstalt bankruptcy in May of 1931, about 79 years ago and just a year and a half into that depression.
The goal of the Republicans is to portray themselves as stern judges of Wall Street, even as they line up in a unanimous phalanx to protect the finance jackals from any meaningful regulation whatsoever — as seen in yesterday’s vote to block cloture on derivatives re-regulation and reform. The goal of the Democrats is to expose the sociopathic evil of Goldman Sachs and the rest of Wall Street while preening themselves as defenders of the public interest, without however banning credit default swaps, banning synthetic CDOs, and imposing a Wall Street sales tax on all remaining derivatives and asset transactions.
To this degree, today’s hearings are being conducted in bad faith by both major parties. However, the dynamic of the resulting spectacle has the result of educating and mobilizing public opinion against the predatory practices which are the essence of Wall Street, even a year and a half after the banking panic of September 2008 and the monster bailout of zombie banks which soon followed. What is required is a new edition of the anti-banker sentiment set off by the Senate Banking Committee hearings conducted from January 1933 to May 1934 by committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora, which unmasked the corruption of Wall Street. Persons of good will need to get active now to push this process as far as possible while these social dynamics are working. It is time to hit the zombie banks, the hedge funds, and their derivatives as hard as possible, before the second wave of the depression hits. The program necessary to fight the depression and break the strangle-hold of Wall Street on the US economy and political system is given on my web site.
Mitch McConnell on the bailout: “Harry, I think we need to do this, we should try to do this, and we can do this.”
During a break the senators filed out, and the GOP reactionary lockstep once again blocked cloture for a final debate on the Wall Street reform bill, weak as it is. Many activists of the Tea Party naively believe that they have been fighting for a year and a half that they have been fighting to take back the Republican Party. If that is what they believe, today’s second cloture vote proves that they have gotten nowhere in their efforts. Despite their charades, the GOP are the bodyguards of the Wall Street predators. Tea baggers who think they can break the Wall Street grip on the Republicans are pathetic dupes, and they need to wake up, pronto.
When Paulson went to the leaders of Congress to demand a $700 billion bailout for Goldman and his Wall Street cronies, GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was “deeply frightened” by the apocalyptic briefing delivered by Paulson and Bernanke. When Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid started talking about how difficult it would be to get so much money in a hurry, McConnell urged an immediate bailout, saying: “Harry, I think we need to do this, we should try to do this, and we can do this.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail [New York: Viking, 2009], p. 442) The GOP was the original party of the bailout, and they have not repented, as best seen through the continuance of McConnell, one of the key midwives of the bailout, as Republican Senate Majority Leader. This is the same McConnell who went to Wall Street recently to meet with zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas, pledging to block derivatives reforms in exchange for big bucks contributed to the GOP’s campaign coffers. Tea baggers who think the GOP has changed or is moving to their side are sadly deluded.
Today, the market fetishism of the crackpot Austrian school has taken a severe blow. Now that Blankfein‘s public image has been soiled by Goldman’s scurrilous and scatological emails, the time is ripe for the radical reform of derivatives and the zombie banks. This is a matter of national survival.
Now that Goldman Sachs is masquerading as a bank holding company, it is subject to FDIC rules. If Goldman’s derivative hoard is marked to market, it is bankrupt. The FDIC should therefore seize Goldman and liquidate it under chapter 7 of the US Code. Sheila Bair should not wait for Friday.
BRING DOWN GOLDMAN SACHS AND EXPOSE THE FINANCIAL COUP
The Role of the SEC and the US Congress
David DeGraw
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18903
Not only did Goldman Sachs profit on betting against CDOs they designed to fail; more importantly, they insured them through AIG which led to a $182 billion taxpayer bailout.
Have you heard the news? It’s everywhere! The SEC and Congress have all of a sudden sprung to life and are now “getting tough” on Goldman Sachs. Is this all the first phase of a long-awaited investigation that will reveal the causes of our current economic crisis, or is this just more show trials and psychological operations designed to manipulate public opinion and make the American people feel that our elected officials are finally standing up to their campaign funders on Wall Street?
First off, let’s address these SEC charges against Goldman Sachs. At first glance you might think, oh big deal, this is just a minor civil suit that only indicts a low-level Goldman employee. Goldman will just throw some money at it and it will most likely go away. After all, Wall Street firms have already thrown over $430 billion out to derail 1500 cases against them, so what will make this any different?
We are also left wondering, if the SEC was serious about this case, why aren’t they investigating and prosecuting John Paulson and top Goldman executives under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statutes? Even the NY Times reported that top executives were involved in the process. If you think Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t fully aware of this billion dollar deal involving John Paulson, you’re delusional. Blankfein became CEO of Goldman due to his outstanding expertise in this particular area, serving as Goldman’s head of the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities Division (FICC) since its formation in 1997.
So unless this is just the first of many moves on the part of the SEC, this whole case amounts to a psychological operation designed to once again quell popular outrage. These indications lead me to believe that this is a classic “limited hang-out.” As Wikipedia explains it:
“A limited hangout is a form of deception, misdirection, or coverup often associated with intelligence agencies involving a release or ‘mea culpa’ type of confession of only part of a set of previously hidden sensitive information, that establishes credibility for the one releasing the information who by the very act of confession appears to be ‘coming clean’ and acting with integrity; but in actuality by withholding key facts is protecting a deeper crime and those who could be exposed if the whole truth came out. In effect, if an array of offenses or misdeeds is suspected, this confession admits to a lesser offense while covering up the greater ones.”
However, on the other hand, if you take a close look at this case, it shows you that the SEC and the recent Senate probe are on exactly the right trail to not only bring down Goldman and the major players who caused the economic crisis, but also to target the key aspects of the much bigger crime, or as I call it the financial coup that led to trillions of our tax dollars being handed over to the very people who caused the crisis.
So let’s look again at the specifics of the SEC case from this angle.
Congress and the SEC are making the case that Goldman Sachs and John Paulson put together CDOs that they knew would fail and then made huge profits shorting (betting against) them.
Although the SEC and Congress are focusing on Goldman Sachs and John Paulson shorting these CDOs they knew would fail, these CDOs are at the heart of the case I presented in my Financial Coup report. Not only did they create CDOs they knew would fail and bet against them, but they also, more importantly, insured these CDOs through AIG. This is the key point and exactly what led to US taxpayers being forced to bail AIG out at the extraordinary expense of $182 billion.
Hank Paulson’s Role
Here’s how a report on Zero Hedge put it: “They [Goldman] fabricated synthetic CDOs, such as Abacus 2007 AC-1. These toxic assets, invented out of thin air, made the meltdown worse than it otherwise would have been. How much worse? Consider the numbers: According to the New York Fed, about $1.275 trillion in subprime mortgage-backed bonds were issued between 2004 and 2006.”
Now, the quote above references some of the CDO time bombs that were created in the market that eventually blew up. Also, notice when the bulk of these CDOs were created - during Hank Paulson’s reign as CEO of Goldman. As I wrote in early February, “Paulson knew these CDOs would go bust because they were based on fraudulent activities…. So Paulson and Goldman Sachs covered their risk by insuring them through AIG, making it pivotal to save AIG….”
So after Hank Paulson and Goldman Sachs created a ticking time bomb in CDOs — Paulson personally made $700 million on these shady activities — they then insured them through AIG. Paulson then moved to the US Treasury where he was calling the shots once his time bomb went off. And once it went off, Paulson quickly made the decision that AIG was “too big too fail” and must be saved at all costs.
As bad as that sounds, this is just part of the story. Enter Edward Liddy, as I wrote:
“Another egregious unilateral move by Paulson was installing Edward Liddy, one of his former board members at Goldman Sachs, as CEO of AIG. Liddy was the Chairman of Goldman’s Audit Committee, making him the most knowledgeable person regarding Goldman’s collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)… making it pivotal to… have one of Paulson’s most trusted allies run the company. With Liddy in place, billions of taxpayer dollars were secretly funneled by the Geithner-led NY Federal Reserve through AIG to Goldman Sachs and several other Wall Street elite counterparties.”
Without the AIG bailout, Goldman Sachs would have collapsed as a result of its own scam. So Hank Paulson, not John Paulson, should be the ultimate target of this investigation.
Credit Ratings Agencies and Other Firms
Other key players in this scam/coup were the credit ratings agencies. Congress is pounding away on this front now as well. Goldman Sachs either duped the major ratings agencies or got them to play along - getting them to give fraudulent AAA ratings to the CDOs that were designed to fail, thus leading investors to believe that they were safe investments.
Now, to be clear, Goldman Sachs wasn’t the only firm to create these CDO bombs, as Pro Publica reported:
“Investment banks including JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America), Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and UBS also created CDOs that a hedge fund named Magnetar was both helping create and betting would fail. Those investment banks marketed and sold the CDOs to investors without disclosing Magnetar’s role or the hedge fund’s interests.
Here is a list of the banks that were involved in Magnetar deals, along with links to many of the prospectuses on the deals, which skip over Magnetar’s role. In all, investment banks created at least 30 CDOs with Magnetar, worth roughly $40 billion overall. Goldman’s 25 Abacus CDOs—one of which is the basis of the SEC’s lawsuit—amounted to $10.9 billion.”
The Federal Reserve’s Role
The investigations also need to target the fact that Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke turned Goldman Sachs into a bank holding company overnight, which gave Goldman and a handful of other firms, chosen by Paulson and Bernanke, access to trillions in taxpayer backed zero interest loans. This allowed them to buy up assets and manipulate the market at a time when other firms, not blessed by the Fed, couldn’t compete. This is why we now see Goldman racking in record breaking profits. Even to this day, the Fed is fighting disclosure of information on these scandalous loans estimated to be worth a stunning $2 trillion. The Fed’s desire to conceal information regarding $2 trillion in taxpayer backed loans demonstrates a complete disregard for the American people.
And while Congress is at it, they need to hold accountable the people involved in the Maiden Lane II and III taxpayer money giveaways. In these deals, the Fed moved tens of billions of taxpayer dollars without Congressional approval prior to TARP and the bailout. This is a direct violation of the Constitution, not to mention completely illegal. The Fed cannot move a single tax dollar without Congressional approval, let alone tens of billions.
Yet another focus of the investigation needs to be the outright fraudulent accounting scams that were exposed in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy report and have since been proven to be standard procedure among the 18 largest politically-connected firms. As Jennifer S. Taub revealed on Baseline Scenario: “…based on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, eighteen banks ‘understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering them an average of 42% at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods.’ These banks include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.”
Once again, the Federal Reserve played a significant role in aiding and abetting these illegal accounting scams, which of course led to record breaking bonuses that are handed out based on false profits.
This is why we must aggressively pursue RICO charges, this is an organized criminal operation of the highest degree.
The bottom line is, these are the illegal activities that led to our current crisis and what amounts to trillions of dollars lost to theft and outright fraud.
There is no question that Congress and the SEC have been derelict in their duties thus far, and possibly criminally negligent, and this all could very well just be more show trials that are psychological operations to make the US public think that there is actually accountability and a rule of law. However, if Congress and the SEC can stay the course and follow this investigation through, it will lead them right into the heart of an intelligence operation designed to take down the US working class taxpayer and enrich the wealthiest people on the planet.
A bold claim, but if Congress and the SEC are actually concerned about the interests of 99% of the US population, their investigation will lead them down this path, which will eventually bring down Goldman Sachs and expose the Financial Coup.
The American public must demand that this investigation proceed along these lines. We are literally confronted with the greatest theft of wealth in history and the consequences of this are only just beginning to reap their toll.
THE STORY OF THE FINANCIAL DEBACLE: GOLDMAN PLAYS, WE PAY
Robert Scheer
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18810
The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
At least the robber barons of old built railroads and steel mills, whereas Goldman Sachs makes its money placing bets on people losing their homes. On Tuesday, Goldman announced a 91 percent jump in profit to $3.46 billion for the quarter, while the dreams of millions of families continue to be foreclosed and unemployment hovers at 10 percent because of a crisis that that very company did much to cause.
It was Goldman-Vice-Chairman-turned-Treasury-Secretary Robert Rubin who pushed through the radical financial deregulation during the Clinton presidency that made the derivatives madness possible. When Bill Clinton was asked on ABC’s Sunday show “This Week” if he now regretted the advice he received back then from Rubin and his protégé Lawrence Summers, now a top Obama adviser, he responded: “On derivatives, yeah, I think they were wrong and I was wrong to take it. …”
Thanks to that bad advice, Clinton signed off on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which categorically exempted those derivatives from any existing law or regulatory body. It was that exemption that freed Goldman Sachs and others on Wall Street to run wild in packaging collateralized debt obligations, and their attendant swaps, which turned people’s home into nothing more than gambling chips. The more suckers to be conned into those mortgage obligations, the better for the financial casino—until it had to be saved by taxpayers from spiraling completely out of control.
And it was Goldman-Chairman-turned-Treasury-Secretary Henry Paulson who engineered the Bush-era bailout that left Goldman holding the high cards. The corporation was allowed to suddenly become a bank holding company, a privilege denied Lehman Brothers, and hence eligible for TARP funding and a sharp discount in the cost of borrowing money. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, worked with Paulson to give Goldman the federally protected status of a commercial bank and also worked on the deal that passed taxpayer money through AIG to Goldman.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that last week Geithner formally opposed the section of a bill by Sen. Blanche Lincoln that would ban banks from dealing in swaps and other derivatives. Now that it is a bank, Goldman would have to drop that lucrative business or give up its right as a bank to borrow from the Federal Reserve as well as the protection of federal deposit insurance.
The test for serious financial reform could well be that if it’s good for Goldman Sachs, it’s bad for the country. But with scores of Goldman alums as well placed in the Obama administration as they were under Clinton and George W. Bush, it is a test the government is likely to fail as far as taxpayers are concerned. Or should we simply trust Mark Patterson, who is chief of staff to Geithner and a Goldman lobbyist for three years before he entered the Obama administration, to do the right thing for the rest of us?
Maybe he will. After all, Gary Gensler, a former Goldman partner who now heads the critically important Commodity Futures Trading Commission, does seem to have had a change of heart from his days in the Clinton administration, when he thought that bringing “legal certainty” to the trade in what turned out to be “toxic derivatives” was a great thing. The SEC civil suit is also a sign of progress. There are other positive stirrings, as in President Barack Obama’s most recent speeches, but what is needed now is a profound populist commitment among those who elected Obama to demand he throw the money-changers out of the temple of democratic governance.
Instead they are crowding in. The New York Times reported: “With so much money at stake, it is not surprising that more than 1,500 lobbyists, executives, bankers and others have made their way to the Senate committee that on Wednesday will take up legislation to rein in derivatives.” That’s the committee that Sen. Lincoln heads, and she needs the president’s support rather than Geithner’s opposition to her plan to ban banks like Goldman from trading in derivatives.
It is insulting to the spirit of populist revolt, which has been fundamental to the success of America’s grand experiment in democracy, that a fat-cat Republican-funded tea party revolt is now the vessel of popular anti-Wall Street discontent. That vessel ought to be our president, who campaigned as a champion of the common people.
Webster G. Tarpley
http://tarpley.net/2010/04/27/seize-and-...man-sachs/
Today’s Senate hearings, carried on CNBC, Bloomberg, and C-SPAN, represent the first major exposure of the American people to the scandalous frauds of the derivatives casino, including synthetic collateralized debt obligations (synthetic CDOs or CDO²). These are things most people have heard very little about. They begin to open up the shocking reality behind such shopworn euphemisms like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and “troubled assets.” Reactionaries in general and Republicans in particular have done everything possible to hide the role of derivatives, which must be considered the main cause of the financial panic of September 2008 which brought down Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG, after felling Bear Stearns in March of the same year. The reactionary legend, repeated yesterday on the Senate floor by financier minion GOP Sen. Gregg of New Hampshire, is that the crisis was caused by poor people taking out subprime mortgages and then defaulting, bringing down the entire Anglo-American banking system and triggering the bailouts. Either that, or too much government spending was too blame.
A mass of kited derivatives blew up in September 2008
This Big Lie has come from such propaganda sources as the Limbaugh Institute of Retarded Reactionary Ranting. But the $1.5 trillion in subprime mortgages were dwarfed by the $15 trillion US residential real estate market, to say nothing of the $1.5 thousand trillion world derivatives bubble. But, starting with Bush-Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the talk has been of a “housing correction,” not a derivatives panic. It must be pointed out that derivatives are nothing but wagers, bets placed from a distance on securities which themselves are often not mortgages, but rather other derivatives. The bettor buying a synthetic CDO or CDO² does not own the underlying mortgages or mortgage-backed securities, any more than someone who bets on a racehorse owns part of the horse. Blankfein and others tried to portray derivatives as a service to hedgers and end-users, but it’s clear that the vast majority of derivatives involve neither hedgers nor users, but only bettors on both side of the transaction. It is in any case this mass of kited derivatives which blew up in 2008, bringing on the present world economic depression.
Goldman Sachs executives are babbling cretins
The mystique of Goldman Sachs is based in large part on their reputation as the smartest financiers on Wall Street. After today’s hearings, this mystique has permanently dissipated. The Goldman executives babbled. They sounded dumb. They stalled and stammered and went into contortions to avoid giving straight answers to simple questions. They were mendacious and evasive when they did speak. Financial powers around the world will note carefully the refusal of three out of four Goldman executives on one panel to state that they had a duty to defend the interests of their clients. Who will want to do business with such a gang? Goldman Sachs got $10 billion of taxpayer money in low-interest loans under the Bush-Paulson TARP. Part of that money went to pay for obscene bonuses for Goldman executives like the ones on display today. The argument for bonuses is that they must be paid to retain the highly talented personnel, virtual geniuses, who are indispensable for Wall Street speculative success. But these are no geniuses, they are imbeciles. No more bonuses should be paid by banks saved through public money.
Don’t buy any used cars from Lloyd Blankfein
Sleaziest of all was Goldman’s risk-monger in chief, Lloyd Blankfein, who pretended not to know that derivatives are often kept hidden off balance sheet. The morally insane Blankfein testified that his role was to provide the firm’s clients with “the risk they wanted.” Other GS witnesses represented the firm’s role as “distributing risk.” But it turned out that they were manufacturing risk through the very existence and activities of Goldman Sachs, which had the result of pyramiding the total risk of the US financial system into intergalactic space. It is time to regulate much of that unbearable risk out of existence with appropriate regulatory legislation. In the meantime, no sane person would buy a used car from Blankfein. Nor should they believe his assurance that the “recession” has ended.
But when at the end of the day Blankfein finally suggested to Sen. Tester that synthetic CDOs might be outlawed, we should accept his proposal immediately.
Today’s hearings reveal the Goldman Sachs gunslingers and whiz kids as ignorant gangsters and con artists, notable only for their ability to practice massive fraud with impudence. These sleazy mediocrities do not deserve bonuses paid for by taxpayers. Rather, it is time to shut them down and put them in the dock.
If Goldman Sachs had cared about is clients, it would have urgently warned them to unload their subprime risk by late 2006 or thereabouts. Instead, Goldman was busily increasing its clients’ risk by selling them more toxic CDOs out of its own inventory warehouse.
Goldman Sachs: bookies who stack the deck and fix the games
As the philandering Sen. Ensign pointed out, comparing Wall Street to Las Vegas is a slander on the croupiers of Las Vegas, where everyone knows or should know that the game is rigged so that the house always wins. To use the comparison introduced by Sen. McCaskill, Goldman Sachs was operating as the gambling house, or the bookie. At the same time, Goldman was betting for their own account. But much worse was the fact that Goldman was stacking the decks, loading the dice, fixing the games on which the bets were placed, and bribing the umpires.
As Ensign put it in a rare moment of lucidity, the subprime mortgage was bad. But the collapse of subprime would not have had anything like its actual destructive effect on the US economy if it had not been compounded by the mass of synthetic derivatives that were piled on top of subprime.
No national or social purpose served by Goldman Sachs and toxic derivatives bets
The broader issue raised by today’s hearing is: what human purpose is served by the existence of Goldman Sachs, which concocts toxic synthetic CDOs for the purpose of allowing speculators, who are often lied to and duped, to bet for or against them. Goldman Sachs can only be described as a speculative parasite which promotes the activities of other speculative parasites, such as the John Paulson hedge fund at the expense of the public and of its other clients. It was a crime to inject $10 billion of Treasury money into Goldman Sachs. It was another crime for the Fed to lend Goldman untold billions (just how many billions Bernanke still refuses to disclose) to keep them afloat and enable more predatory profits. These crimes must stop, and the public money must be clawed back. Most important, it is time to shut down the derivatives rackets.
Goldman got $12.5 billion from taxpayers for AIG credit default swaps
Useful questions from GOP Sen. Coburn pointed to another kind of derivative: the infamous credit default swap (CDS). These CDS are what brought down AIG, whose London hedge fund had issues $3 trillion in derivatives. When the government bailed out AIG, part of that $180 billion of taxpayer money was used for payouts to the CDS counterparties of AIG, biggest among them Goldman, which got $12.5 billion from the US taxpayer. That was 100 cents on the dollar on a mass of toxic CDS. Coburn wanted to know why Goldman got all their money back, while GM bondholders took a bath as GM went bankrupt. That was, of course, a matter of Goldman’s political clout through GS alum Henry Paulson and Obama Car Czar Steve “The Rat” Rattner, backed up by the historic preponderance of finance capital over industrial capital in this country since Andrew Carnegie sold out to JP Morgan over a century ago.
Derivatives and zombie banks: the toll
Thanks to Goldman Sachs, the other Wall Street zombie banks, and their derivatives, the financial panic of 2008 has turned into a world economic depression of unimaginable proportions. The unemployed and underemployed in the US alone are surely in excess of 20 million. Five to six million home foreclosures are already done or in the pipeline, throwing tens of millions of Americans out of their homes. World trade has been seriously impacted. The budgets of California, New York, Illinois, and many other states are in crisis, with massive layoffs of teachers and other state employees. An entire generation is being destroyed. Now, Greek bonds are trading at junk levels under the attack of speculative predators including Soros, Greenlight Capital, SAC, and the protagonists of today’s hearings – Paulson and Co and Goldman Sachs itself. The attack on Greece and the euro represents the leading edge of the second wave of the depression, which is now arriving in much the same way that the second wave of the 1930s depression was unleashed by the Vienna Kreditanstalt bankruptcy in May of 1931, about 79 years ago and just a year and a half into that depression.
The goal of the Republicans is to portray themselves as stern judges of Wall Street, even as they line up in a unanimous phalanx to protect the finance jackals from any meaningful regulation whatsoever — as seen in yesterday’s vote to block cloture on derivatives re-regulation and reform. The goal of the Democrats is to expose the sociopathic evil of Goldman Sachs and the rest of Wall Street while preening themselves as defenders of the public interest, without however banning credit default swaps, banning synthetic CDOs, and imposing a Wall Street sales tax on all remaining derivatives and asset transactions.
To this degree, today’s hearings are being conducted in bad faith by both major parties. However, the dynamic of the resulting spectacle has the result of educating and mobilizing public opinion against the predatory practices which are the essence of Wall Street, even a year and a half after the banking panic of September 2008 and the monster bailout of zombie banks which soon followed. What is required is a new edition of the anti-banker sentiment set off by the Senate Banking Committee hearings conducted from January 1933 to May 1934 by committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora, which unmasked the corruption of Wall Street. Persons of good will need to get active now to push this process as far as possible while these social dynamics are working. It is time to hit the zombie banks, the hedge funds, and their derivatives as hard as possible, before the second wave of the depression hits. The program necessary to fight the depression and break the strangle-hold of Wall Street on the US economy and political system is given on my web site.
Mitch McConnell on the bailout: “Harry, I think we need to do this, we should try to do this, and we can do this.”
During a break the senators filed out, and the GOP reactionary lockstep once again blocked cloture for a final debate on the Wall Street reform bill, weak as it is. Many activists of the Tea Party naively believe that they have been fighting for a year and a half that they have been fighting to take back the Republican Party. If that is what they believe, today’s second cloture vote proves that they have gotten nowhere in their efforts. Despite their charades, the GOP are the bodyguards of the Wall Street predators. Tea baggers who think they can break the Wall Street grip on the Republicans are pathetic dupes, and they need to wake up, pronto.
When Paulson went to the leaders of Congress to demand a $700 billion bailout for Goldman and his Wall Street cronies, GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was “deeply frightened” by the apocalyptic briefing delivered by Paulson and Bernanke. When Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid started talking about how difficult it would be to get so much money in a hurry, McConnell urged an immediate bailout, saying: “Harry, I think we need to do this, we should try to do this, and we can do this.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail [New York: Viking, 2009], p. 442) The GOP was the original party of the bailout, and they have not repented, as best seen through the continuance of McConnell, one of the key midwives of the bailout, as Republican Senate Majority Leader. This is the same McConnell who went to Wall Street recently to meet with zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas, pledging to block derivatives reforms in exchange for big bucks contributed to the GOP’s campaign coffers. Tea baggers who think the GOP has changed or is moving to their side are sadly deluded.
Today, the market fetishism of the crackpot Austrian school has taken a severe blow. Now that Blankfein‘s public image has been soiled by Goldman’s scurrilous and scatological emails, the time is ripe for the radical reform of derivatives and the zombie banks. This is a matter of national survival.
Now that Goldman Sachs is masquerading as a bank holding company, it is subject to FDIC rules. If Goldman’s derivative hoard is marked to market, it is bankrupt. The FDIC should therefore seize Goldman and liquidate it under chapter 7 of the US Code. Sheila Bair should not wait for Friday.
BRING DOWN GOLDMAN SACHS AND EXPOSE THE FINANCIAL COUP
The Role of the SEC and the US Congress
David DeGraw
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18903
Not only did Goldman Sachs profit on betting against CDOs they designed to fail; more importantly, they insured them through AIG which led to a $182 billion taxpayer bailout.
Have you heard the news? It’s everywhere! The SEC and Congress have all of a sudden sprung to life and are now “getting tough” on Goldman Sachs. Is this all the first phase of a long-awaited investigation that will reveal the causes of our current economic crisis, or is this just more show trials and psychological operations designed to manipulate public opinion and make the American people feel that our elected officials are finally standing up to their campaign funders on Wall Street?
First off, let’s address these SEC charges against Goldman Sachs. At first glance you might think, oh big deal, this is just a minor civil suit that only indicts a low-level Goldman employee. Goldman will just throw some money at it and it will most likely go away. After all, Wall Street firms have already thrown over $430 billion out to derail 1500 cases against them, so what will make this any different?
We are also left wondering, if the SEC was serious about this case, why aren’t they investigating and prosecuting John Paulson and top Goldman executives under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statutes? Even the NY Times reported that top executives were involved in the process. If you think Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t fully aware of this billion dollar deal involving John Paulson, you’re delusional. Blankfein became CEO of Goldman due to his outstanding expertise in this particular area, serving as Goldman’s head of the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities Division (FICC) since its formation in 1997.
So unless this is just the first of many moves on the part of the SEC, this whole case amounts to a psychological operation designed to once again quell popular outrage. These indications lead me to believe that this is a classic “limited hang-out.” As Wikipedia explains it:
“A limited hangout is a form of deception, misdirection, or coverup often associated with intelligence agencies involving a release or ‘mea culpa’ type of confession of only part of a set of previously hidden sensitive information, that establishes credibility for the one releasing the information who by the very act of confession appears to be ‘coming clean’ and acting with integrity; but in actuality by withholding key facts is protecting a deeper crime and those who could be exposed if the whole truth came out. In effect, if an array of offenses or misdeeds is suspected, this confession admits to a lesser offense while covering up the greater ones.”
However, on the other hand, if you take a close look at this case, it shows you that the SEC and the recent Senate probe are on exactly the right trail to not only bring down Goldman and the major players who caused the economic crisis, but also to target the key aspects of the much bigger crime, or as I call it the financial coup that led to trillions of our tax dollars being handed over to the very people who caused the crisis.
So let’s look again at the specifics of the SEC case from this angle.
Congress and the SEC are making the case that Goldman Sachs and John Paulson put together CDOs that they knew would fail and then made huge profits shorting (betting against) them.
Although the SEC and Congress are focusing on Goldman Sachs and John Paulson shorting these CDOs they knew would fail, these CDOs are at the heart of the case I presented in my Financial Coup report. Not only did they create CDOs they knew would fail and bet against them, but they also, more importantly, insured these CDOs through AIG. This is the key point and exactly what led to US taxpayers being forced to bail AIG out at the extraordinary expense of $182 billion.
Hank Paulson’s Role
Here’s how a report on Zero Hedge put it: “They [Goldman] fabricated synthetic CDOs, such as Abacus 2007 AC-1. These toxic assets, invented out of thin air, made the meltdown worse than it otherwise would have been. How much worse? Consider the numbers: According to the New York Fed, about $1.275 trillion in subprime mortgage-backed bonds were issued between 2004 and 2006.”
Now, the quote above references some of the CDO time bombs that were created in the market that eventually blew up. Also, notice when the bulk of these CDOs were created - during Hank Paulson’s reign as CEO of Goldman. As I wrote in early February, “Paulson knew these CDOs would go bust because they were based on fraudulent activities…. So Paulson and Goldman Sachs covered their risk by insuring them through AIG, making it pivotal to save AIG….”
So after Hank Paulson and Goldman Sachs created a ticking time bomb in CDOs — Paulson personally made $700 million on these shady activities — they then insured them through AIG. Paulson then moved to the US Treasury where he was calling the shots once his time bomb went off. And once it went off, Paulson quickly made the decision that AIG was “too big too fail” and must be saved at all costs.
As bad as that sounds, this is just part of the story. Enter Edward Liddy, as I wrote:
“Another egregious unilateral move by Paulson was installing Edward Liddy, one of his former board members at Goldman Sachs, as CEO of AIG. Liddy was the Chairman of Goldman’s Audit Committee, making him the most knowledgeable person regarding Goldman’s collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)… making it pivotal to… have one of Paulson’s most trusted allies run the company. With Liddy in place, billions of taxpayer dollars were secretly funneled by the Geithner-led NY Federal Reserve through AIG to Goldman Sachs and several other Wall Street elite counterparties.”
Without the AIG bailout, Goldman Sachs would have collapsed as a result of its own scam. So Hank Paulson, not John Paulson, should be the ultimate target of this investigation.
Credit Ratings Agencies and Other Firms
Other key players in this scam/coup were the credit ratings agencies. Congress is pounding away on this front now as well. Goldman Sachs either duped the major ratings agencies or got them to play along - getting them to give fraudulent AAA ratings to the CDOs that were designed to fail, thus leading investors to believe that they were safe investments.
Now, to be clear, Goldman Sachs wasn’t the only firm to create these CDO bombs, as Pro Publica reported:
“Investment banks including JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America), Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and UBS also created CDOs that a hedge fund named Magnetar was both helping create and betting would fail. Those investment banks marketed and sold the CDOs to investors without disclosing Magnetar’s role or the hedge fund’s interests.
Here is a list of the banks that were involved in Magnetar deals, along with links to many of the prospectuses on the deals, which skip over Magnetar’s role. In all, investment banks created at least 30 CDOs with Magnetar, worth roughly $40 billion overall. Goldman’s 25 Abacus CDOs—one of which is the basis of the SEC’s lawsuit—amounted to $10.9 billion.”
The Federal Reserve’s Role
The investigations also need to target the fact that Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke turned Goldman Sachs into a bank holding company overnight, which gave Goldman and a handful of other firms, chosen by Paulson and Bernanke, access to trillions in taxpayer backed zero interest loans. This allowed them to buy up assets and manipulate the market at a time when other firms, not blessed by the Fed, couldn’t compete. This is why we now see Goldman racking in record breaking profits. Even to this day, the Fed is fighting disclosure of information on these scandalous loans estimated to be worth a stunning $2 trillion. The Fed’s desire to conceal information regarding $2 trillion in taxpayer backed loans demonstrates a complete disregard for the American people.
And while Congress is at it, they need to hold accountable the people involved in the Maiden Lane II and III taxpayer money giveaways. In these deals, the Fed moved tens of billions of taxpayer dollars without Congressional approval prior to TARP and the bailout. This is a direct violation of the Constitution, not to mention completely illegal. The Fed cannot move a single tax dollar without Congressional approval, let alone tens of billions.
Yet another focus of the investigation needs to be the outright fraudulent accounting scams that were exposed in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy report and have since been proven to be standard procedure among the 18 largest politically-connected firms. As Jennifer S. Taub revealed on Baseline Scenario: “…based on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, eighteen banks ‘understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering them an average of 42% at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods.’ These banks include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.”
Once again, the Federal Reserve played a significant role in aiding and abetting these illegal accounting scams, which of course led to record breaking bonuses that are handed out based on false profits.
This is why we must aggressively pursue RICO charges, this is an organized criminal operation of the highest degree.
The bottom line is, these are the illegal activities that led to our current crisis and what amounts to trillions of dollars lost to theft and outright fraud.
There is no question that Congress and the SEC have been derelict in their duties thus far, and possibly criminally negligent, and this all could very well just be more show trials that are psychological operations to make the US public think that there is actually accountability and a rule of law. However, if Congress and the SEC can stay the course and follow this investigation through, it will lead them right into the heart of an intelligence operation designed to take down the US working class taxpayer and enrich the wealthiest people on the planet.
A bold claim, but if Congress and the SEC are actually concerned about the interests of 99% of the US population, their investigation will lead them down this path, which will eventually bring down Goldman Sachs and expose the Financial Coup.
The American public must demand that this investigation proceed along these lines. We are literally confronted with the greatest theft of wealth in history and the consequences of this are only just beginning to reap their toll.
THE STORY OF THE FINANCIAL DEBACLE: GOLDMAN PLAYS, WE PAY
Robert Scheer
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18810
The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
At least the robber barons of old built railroads and steel mills, whereas Goldman Sachs makes its money placing bets on people losing their homes. On Tuesday, Goldman announced a 91 percent jump in profit to $3.46 billion for the quarter, while the dreams of millions of families continue to be foreclosed and unemployment hovers at 10 percent because of a crisis that that very company did much to cause.
It was Goldman-Vice-Chairman-turned-Treasury-Secretary Robert Rubin who pushed through the radical financial deregulation during the Clinton presidency that made the derivatives madness possible. When Bill Clinton was asked on ABC’s Sunday show “This Week” if he now regretted the advice he received back then from Rubin and his protégé Lawrence Summers, now a top Obama adviser, he responded: “On derivatives, yeah, I think they were wrong and I was wrong to take it. …”
Thanks to that bad advice, Clinton signed off on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which categorically exempted those derivatives from any existing law or regulatory body. It was that exemption that freed Goldman Sachs and others on Wall Street to run wild in packaging collateralized debt obligations, and their attendant swaps, which turned people’s home into nothing more than gambling chips. The more suckers to be conned into those mortgage obligations, the better for the financial casino—until it had to be saved by taxpayers from spiraling completely out of control.
And it was Goldman-Chairman-turned-Treasury-Secretary Henry Paulson who engineered the Bush-era bailout that left Goldman holding the high cards. The corporation was allowed to suddenly become a bank holding company, a privilege denied Lehman Brothers, and hence eligible for TARP funding and a sharp discount in the cost of borrowing money. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, worked with Paulson to give Goldman the federally protected status of a commercial bank and also worked on the deal that passed taxpayer money through AIG to Goldman.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that last week Geithner formally opposed the section of a bill by Sen. Blanche Lincoln that would ban banks from dealing in swaps and other derivatives. Now that it is a bank, Goldman would have to drop that lucrative business or give up its right as a bank to borrow from the Federal Reserve as well as the protection of federal deposit insurance.
The test for serious financial reform could well be that if it’s good for Goldman Sachs, it’s bad for the country. But with scores of Goldman alums as well placed in the Obama administration as they were under Clinton and George W. Bush, it is a test the government is likely to fail as far as taxpayers are concerned. Or should we simply trust Mark Patterson, who is chief of staff to Geithner and a Goldman lobbyist for three years before he entered the Obama administration, to do the right thing for the rest of us?
Maybe he will. After all, Gary Gensler, a former Goldman partner who now heads the critically important Commodity Futures Trading Commission, does seem to have had a change of heart from his days in the Clinton administration, when he thought that bringing “legal certainty” to the trade in what turned out to be “toxic derivatives” was a great thing. The SEC civil suit is also a sign of progress. There are other positive stirrings, as in President Barack Obama’s most recent speeches, but what is needed now is a profound populist commitment among those who elected Obama to demand he throw the money-changers out of the temple of democratic governance.
Instead they are crowding in. The New York Times reported: “With so much money at stake, it is not surprising that more than 1,500 lobbyists, executives, bankers and others have made their way to the Senate committee that on Wednesday will take up legislation to rein in derivatives.” That’s the committee that Sen. Lincoln heads, and she needs the president’s support rather than Geithner’s opposition to her plan to ban banks like Goldman from trading in derivatives.
It is insulting to the spirit of populist revolt, which has been fundamental to the success of America’s grand experiment in democracy, that a fat-cat Republican-funded tea party revolt is now the vessel of popular anti-Wall Street discontent. That vessel ought to be our president, who campaigned as a champion of the common people.