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a500lbgorilla
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02-21-2010, 02:18 PM
Post subject: Learn to hate Goldman Sachs
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#1 (permalink)
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JESUS TAKE THE KEYBOARD
Join Date: Sep 2004
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Wall Street's Bailout Hustle : Rolling Stone
A bit of a read to get your ire up.
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To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blankfein meant by "performance": Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. I mean, shit — who wouldn't deserve billions in bonuses for doing all that?
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Smithers, use the amnesia ray.
You mean the revolver, sir?
Precisely.
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CoccoBill
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Flush
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Finding my game
Posts: 423
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Hate the game, not the players. No regulation ftw.
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Jack Sawyer
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4-of-a-Kind
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Old School
Posts: 2,535
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Excellent link, thanks for the share.
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My dream... is to fly... over the rainbow... so high...
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VHS is like a book and a book is like a stack of kindles.
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Hey, I'm in a movie!
http://youtu.be/lGdnIrRKDTI
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Warpe
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Moderator
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Canuckistan
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Wow, Rolling Stone goes to a parked domain page?
http://www.rollingstone.com/
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UG
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Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,855
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didn't realize there was a link there
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flomo
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Full House
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: mashing potatoes
Posts: 878
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looks like wall street is trying to shut those hippies up.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bigred
Protect dog
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a500lbgorilla
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JESUS TAKE THE KEYBOARD
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: This room is a good place to be
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On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America's pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman's role in precipitating the global financial crisis.
The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses — meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a "bailout tax" on banks. Maybe this wasn't the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.
Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. "In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines," he said, "I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative."
Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we're so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.
Goldman wasn't alone. The nation's six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a gesture of self-sacrifice, Blankfein himself took a humiliatingly low bonus of $9 million, less than the 2009 pay of elephantine New York Knicks washout Eddy Curry. But in reality, not much had changed. "What is the state of our moral being when Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?" asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.
Beyond a few such bleats of outrage, however, the huge payout was met, by and large, with a collective sigh of resignation. Because beneath America's populist veneer, on a more subtle strata of the national psyche, there remains a strong temptation to not really give a shit. The rich, after all, have always made way too much money; what's the difference if some fat cat in New York pockets $20 million instead of $10 million?
The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because there's still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street "earns" its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around "earns." The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street's eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its "performance" was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?
The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.
DAMN I have only the first of 7 pages left in my internet cache. It's a good article running down all the different classic con-games Goldman Sachs ran on the financial sector and the US taxpayers.
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Smithers, use the amnesia ray.
You mean the revolver, sir?
Precisely.
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flomo
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Full House
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: mashing potatoes
Posts: 878
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In american tradition some one needs to be spanked, i feel sorry for toyota.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bigred
Protect dog
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Warpe
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Moderator
Join Date: Sep 2005
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Did Max write it?
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Warpe
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Moderator
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Canuckistan
Posts: 3,905
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RollingStone.com Outage: Website 'Glitch,' Not Domain Issue
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Numbr2intheWorld
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Moderator
Join Date: Aug 2006
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We gave a huge company a shitload of money and let them do whatever they wanted with it, and now we're mad that they did whatever they want?
Don't get me wrong, this is obviously ridiculous and it's just plain sad that this is going on.
I just see an ongoing trend with government recently. Let's do something flawed and blame others when it predictably goes wrong.
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a500lbgorilla
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JESUS TAKE THE KEYBOARD
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: This room is a good place to be
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Originally Posted by January 29th, 2007
"When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: "Well, what if we created a "thing", which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?") it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight...It's a little like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor  " |
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Originally Posted by March 7th, 2007
"... I will give you more details in person on what we spoke about but the summary of the US subprime business situation is that it is not too brilliant...According to Sparks [Daniel Sparks, a former head of the mortgages department at Goldman], that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!...I do not intend to wait for the complete explosion of the industry and the beginning of distressed trading, I think there might be more interesting things to do in Europe..."
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BBC News - Goldman Sachs: Fabrice Tourre's private emails
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Smithers, use the amnesia ray.
You mean the revolver, sir?
Precisely.
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a500lbgorilla
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JESUS TAKE THE KEYBOARD
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: This room is a good place to be
Posts: 8,379
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Originally Posted by June 13th, 2007
"Just made it to the country of your favorite clients [Belgians]!!! I'm managed to sell a few abacus bonds [Abacus was one of Goldman Sachs's Collateralised Debt Obligations, tied to the performance of sub-prime mortgage-backed securities] to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport..."
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Just finishing up the article.
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Smithers, use the amnesia ray.
You mean the revolver, sir?
Precisely.
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a500lbgorilla
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JESUS TAKE THE KEYBOARD
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: This room is a good place to be
Posts: 8,379
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YouTube - YES! Senator Carl Levin (D) Confronts Goldman-Sachs Execs With Some Strong Language!
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Smithers, use the amnesia ray.
You mean the revolver, sir?
Precisely.
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wufwugy
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4-of-a-Kind
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 1,660
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why do i now wanna go to city wok and get some city shrimp
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