This just infuriated me:
“Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” Goldman’s chief financial officer tells Bloomberg News. Value-at-risk — a statistical measure of how much the firm’s trading operations could lose in a day — rose to an average of $245 million in the second quarter from $240 million in the first quarter. In the second quarter of 2008, VaR averaged $184 million.
Goldman and others brought the world financial sector to their knees, are largely responsible for the worldwide recession, required ten billion in TARP funds, protection as they moved from investment bank status, billions in loans, thirteen billion in direct payments from the taxpayer (routed through AIG), god only knows what else from the Fed’s hidden behavior, as well as a Paulson assist in the elimination of their competition, and here is the CFO of Goldman telling you that they learned nothing and that nothing changed.
I’d have more respect for these guys if they would just cut the double-talk and instead of granting interviews, just bought full page ads in the NY Times mooning us. But why should they even bother? We clearly don’t care enough to do anything about it.
JenJen
John, just in case you or anyone else missed it, my future ex-husband Matt Taibbi’s excellent Rolling Stone piece, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” is now online in its entirety at Rolling Stone (it was previously only excerpted, unless you bought the dead tree version):
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine
John Cole
@JenJen: I’ve heard that everything in that piece is technically true, but collectively nonsense.
General Winfield Stuck
Without draconian reform or outright banning of risky schemes like CDS swaps, as well as separating wall st. banking from gambling the stock market, we will soon return to feeding the greedy monster.
Zifnab
Why change? They’ve got the system pegged down pretty good. If you were turning over billions in profit during the height of a recession, would you change? They’ve got absolutely no incentive to alter their behaviors.
Mentis Fugit
Just mooning? Surely more appropriate would be a shot from a teabagee’s POV. After all, this is Goldman Sacks we’re talking about.
BombIranForChrist
The optimist in me wants to say that all of this is fine. Just a few months ago, we (and the White House) were in a cold panic that the economy was about to go off a cliff. Now it looks like at least one of the players is back on its feet, so let’s just take a big breath and start implementing some regulations, like capital requirements, etc.
But the cynic in me wants to say, and in fact believes, that the Powers that Be _want_ us to be simply happy that the world didn’t end, so that they continue to rob us blind.
We will soon know the true character of Obama, I think.
JenJen
@John Cole: Oh noes, have you been reading Megan McArdle again?
This live discussion of the piece between Taibbi and the always-excellent Sam Seder is good, too:
http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5015
passerby
Seconded.
Curious we haven’t heard from current Sec. of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs alum Tim Geitner lately. Has he really been too busy to step up to a microphone and/or are the media that incurious?
Where did all that bailout money go, Timmy? You on this or what?
Leisureguy
Paulman s/b Paulson?
The Taibbi piece is good.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Government Sachs may be just BSing everybody for PR reasons, but even more disturbing is the possibility that they believe their own BS. It strikes me as the financial equivalent of the sort of eternal innocence that John’s old CO blasts in this article about Graham Greene and The Quiet American
Zifnab
@BombIranForChrist:
We’ll know his true character when we A) see how all the stimulus money was spent, B) learn whether cap’n’trade passes and if so what exactly it will accomplish, and C) get our public option health care (or not). There’s a D) floating around about prosecuting the previous administrations for their abuses of power, too.
Getting after the financial sector is so far down the list it is barely worth mentioning. You want him to take on the Insurance sector, the Wall Street sector, the neo-cons, and the Oil Industry all at once? I mean, if he can accomplish any one of these goals, he’s made progress. Two or more and he’s scoring big points. But I’m not going to hold Obama accountable for failing to clean up a mess spanning a generation.
Goldman Sachs is a monster that’s been marauding through town for a long time.
General Winfield Stuck
Some good news today on that front. but only one step along a very bumpy road till it gets passed/
robertdsc
When Geithner and Summers are given their walking papers and people who have some fucking clue on how to crack down on Wall Street are hired, then I’ll have a shred of hope. Until then, I’m in the camp that Obama’s on track to be included in the worst president ever category.
bob h
I would feel better about all this if there were some quid pro quo for pulling their fat out of the fire. But there is none; these bastards will not even have to pay higher tax rates.
John Cole
@bob h: No shit. They paid 14 million as a corporation last year.
Brick Oven Bill
Islam goes too far in banning interest, in an effort to keep things simple and transparent. But Mohammed was on the right track.
Eliminate short sales, eliminate options, eliminate futures, eliminate credit default swaps, eliminate collateralized debt obligations. All of this goofy crap that these specialist pinheads use to create personal profit and transfer risk to others.
If a businessman wants to offer a part of their business to the public and sell stock, great. If somebody wants to buy that stock, let the market establish the price. If another person wants to sell that stock, let the market establish the price. Other than that, these Wall Street games do more harm than good.
KG
So, um, you’re telling me you’re still breaking the law? Someone might want to send that little piece of information over to an enterprising young lawyer at the DOJ Antitrust team, or maybe someone at the SEC would be interested.
Violet
@Zifnab:
Bingo. And neither does Congress – the proverbial fox in charge of the hen house. It’s going to take something to shake up the system to get it to change. Either they’re going to have to fear something (being thrown in prison?) or a person with an exceptionally strong moral center is going to have to come along and make change happen.
I’m not holding my breath.
Irony Abounds
C’mon guys, why all the hand-wringing. I heard on CNBC today that Merrill Lynch has declared that the recession is over! I’m feeling all perky again. Maybe I’ll splurge on a new car, new furniture, or some type of conspicuous consumption.
Goldman Sachs has actually gotten more brazen, if that is indeed possible. Whomever gave them money out of AIG needs to be horse-whipped.
The Grand Panjandrum
A few years from now we’ll all be here expressing our outrage at the next big bubble: cap and trade. Goldman Sachs will be fucking us again and we still won’t be getting so much as a “I’ll respect you in the morning” to ease the pain. Either Congress and the President puts an end to this now or it will happen again.
beltane
Well, at least we know where everyone’s 401(k) money disappeared to. Maybe we’re lacking in proper altruism; we should consider getting fleeced by our financial baron class to be one of the joys of living in a free society.
Zandar
When one controls the cards, the dealer, the table, the street corner, all the other dealers and their tables, cards, and street corners, the city, the county, the state, and the nation, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn you as the player are losing at three card monte.
And when the next leg of the recession comes later this year or early next, Goldman Sachs will make a mint then too.
Birds gotta fly, bees gotta sting, phoenix and dragon must fight, it is the way of all things.
Goldman Sachs has to rip America off and America will keep on letting them.
Anne Laurie
This is the sort of distasteful and highly inappropriate vulgarity that convinces Megan McArdle and Howie Kurtz that the serious people will never need pay attention to mere filthy-mouthed bloggers!
Also, since Taibbi used the words “squid” and “tribe” in reference to Goldman Sachs, he is an anti-semite and thus worthy only of being ignored!
(/snark)
cfaller96
John, that’s not even the worst of it. Value at Risk (VaR) is a horribly, horribly flawed model to use. It’s one of the reasons why the Banksters brought the world economy to its knees- thanks to VaR, they had a grossly exaggerated view of their control over risk, and were caught unaware when their portfolios went to shit.
The fact that they’ve increased their daily risk by 33% is bad enough. But that they’re still using VaR to establish a “comfort level” with this 33% increase is really shocking.
clone12
On the other hand, if the highly profitable company is magnanimously enough to give back part of the AIG money they won from the dumb saps that were ultimately TARP money, I say we call it square and they can go on terrorizing all the other Wall Street saps.
Lit3Bolt
All of you are just anti capitalists smearing one of America’s best run blameless financial institutions.
steve s
I think it was this sort of thing, a decade ago, which awakened me from my libertarian direction. The rich steal everything they can get their hands on, and always will. America only produces a good infrastracture and middle class when it taxes a large amount of it back and builds roads, the GI Bill, vaccines, school lunches, etc.
Lit3Bolt
Rick Newman upholds the status quo. What an “edgy” and “fresh” perspective!
MikeN
“We clearly don’t care enough to do anything about it.”
And your suggestion is? If “we” were in charge there’d be hell to pay up and down Wall Street. Writing to our congress-critters is pointless, and voting is a sad joke.
Live without credit? Dont buy things from businesses that are big enough to need places like Goldman?
How do we “do something” about any of this….besides work and starve (the poor man’s boom and bust)?
arguingwithsignposts
who is this “we” of whom you speak? DC plutocrats don’t want to do anything about it. There are quite a few of us in the non-punditariat who would love to do something about it.
Comrade Kevin
Some assclown on the GOS was suggesting that Taibbi and Greenwald are anti-Semites because they’ve criticized Goldman.
JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN's Official Stalker
Sigh. I don’t know why I bother, but I’m going to try again. I’ll start out by saying, despite the fact that it should be clear to anyone who actually bothers to read a decent sample f my stuff, that I don’t have any brief for Goldman. They are evil. We really need to put a stop to the ways that they make money.
However, there seems to be a pathological need among a bunch of you people to tell a simple conspiracy story about them. You aren’t content for Goldman Sachs to be a real world villain; you need them to be a cartoon villain, complete with handlebar mustache. This leads to, among other things, some factual errors:
The key phrase here is “and others.” There isn’t any evidence that Goldman needed tens of billions in TARP funds. They may have needed some of the other bailouts, but even that is far from clear. What is true is that, with most of the other conduits, especially as an AIG counter-party, there was no legal way to provide bailouts to other firms without allowing Goldman access. Can you picture someone standing up in court to make a serious argument that AIG’s contracts with everyone else had to be honored, but that it should be legal to let them default to just one specific counter-party?
The reason you haven’t heard from “Goldman Sachs alum Tim Geitner” lately is that there is no such person. Tim Geithner, at least the one that is currently the Treasury Secretary, is a career civil servant. He not only hasn’t worked for GS, but he hasn’t worked for any other firm on the Street, either. He worked for the Treasury Department from 1988 to 2001, then the Council on Foreign Relations and the IMF from 2001 to 2003, and was then president of the NY Fed.
The same is pretty much true of Lawrence Summers, except that he spent much of his life in academia. Save for a part-time job at a small investment boutique in 2006, he’s never worked for a financial firm, either. You may not like the policies either of them advocates, but you’ll have tto do so without resorting to the false shorthand of saying that they do it because they worked for Goldman.
<blockquoteJohn, that’s not even the worst of it. Value at Risk (VaR) is a horribly, horribly flawed model to use. It’s one of the reasons why the Banksters brought the world economy to its knees- thanks to VaR, they had a grossly exaggerated view of their control over risk, and were caught unaware when their portfolios went to shit.
This is all very true, and if you think that Goldman actually relies on VaR to do its risk management, you’re clueless. None of the big investment banks did so. They may use it as a shorthand for expressing magnitudes, like they do in this excerpt, but it isn’t what runs the models. I can tell you this for sure about Citigroup, because I sat in meetings about how Citi measured its risks back when I worked for them five years or so ago, and talked to some of the people in charge about this very question. I guarantee you that Goldman didn’t use it that way, either.
Yes, a lot of institutions had a grossly exaggerated view of how they were managing risk, but it’s a much more complicated (and, to me at least, much more interesting) story than this. The biggest problem at the investment bank level was that they didn’t account for counter-party risk. They forgot to ask whether or not AIG could really pay off on all of those CDS they were writing.
Where the modeling went so badly wrong was over the question of statistical independence. Really, this is fundamentally a problem with the entire concept of financial mathematics. I won’t go into the details here, but it is related to the assumption that housing won’t go down on a nationwide level.
The thing about Goldman, though, is that it seemed pretty clear to me that they were ahead of the markets. The thing to remember about derivatives trading is that it is zero sum. If a trade is a big loser for someone, then someone else was a big winner. I’m not sure why it’s so hard for people to believe that there was someone in the industry who actually was smarter than everyone else, and managed to be on the right side of more trades than not, and made huge piles of money. Goldman is that someone, or at least the biggest someone.
I will, again, point out that people have the causality of why Goldman has so many alumni in important places at least partially backwards. They are, consistently, the smartest operation on the Street. This means that everyone hires their people.
As I said, I have no brief for them. Ideally, we’ll figure out a way to put them out of business. Part of being the smartest on the Street is that they are better at manipulating the system in unhealthy ways. They do plenty of straight up sleazy things, too, like taking advantage of a change in accounting policies to bury a bunch of losses into a month that doesn’t count as any of their fiscal years. They’re evil. What they aren’t is Snidely Whiplash.
burnspbesq
An alternate, and to me highly plausible, view of how and why AIG went down.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/aig200908
Redhand
GS truly ought to be prosecuted and broken up as a RICO organization. I read the Taibbi article in the dead tree edition and was ready to kill. GS is like Jay Gould in the late 19th Century: one slimy scheme after another.
Tons of people are still out of work and these greedy, cheating bastards sit there and gloat while preening about how great they are. It’s enough to make one vomit.
a
Not sure what the fuss is about, sounds like 1 or 2 of many many financial services firms is going to outperform this year. Many, many more are going to fall over.
Should we want our tarp investments to default?
MBSS
hahaha
it’s not that the game is rigged, it’s that some people are just faster than you. accept it.
Fulcanelli
@JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN’s Official Stalker: “They do plenty of straight up sleazy things, too, like taking advantage of a change in accounting policies to bury a bunch of losses into a month that doesn’t count as any of their fiscal years.”
So there’s a month somewhere that’s not a part of any of their fiscal year reporting? Or am I missing something?
If I take what you just said there at face value I’m going to have to kill somebody. Please explain.
Dave
@Fulcanelli:
December 2008, it is not part of their reporting. It is an “orphaned” month, and IIRC they wouldn’t have been able to report a profit otherwise.
JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN's Official Stalker
They switched from a Dec 1 – Nov 31 fiscal year to calendar year. This means that December 2008 isn’t a part of any fiscal year, so they stuffed a bunch of losing trades into that month, and never reported them as a part of any annual report. Anyone who knows anything about reading financial statements won’t get fooled by it, but there are plenty of amateurs out there.
passerby
@JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN’s Official Stalker:
Oops. I stand corrected.
It was his position as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that left me with the impression that he was a big league player in the financial world and which was why I associated him as having prior experience with thieving bankers.
JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN's Official Stalker
@passerby: You do realize that you have proceeded to define things such that there *can’t* be a Treasury Secretary that isn’t in bed with the finance industry, right? If having a job like President of the NY Fed or Treasury Secretary makes you a tool, then they will all be tools, with no exception. Maybe you should rely upon something a little less circular.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
What pisses me off about companies like Goldman is that they don’t produce a damned thing while announcing record profits and payouts. All they do is make money with money and the money they make, while profit, is extracted from various parts of the economy. What are the effects of this extraction? From my POV, it’s one of the reasons stuff costs more.
While profitable (with a $13 billion dollar boostershot from
AIGus), GS and their kind are not productive companies. They don’t make squat, they just suck up everyone else’s cash.MBSS
they are all tools, almost without exception and there can’t be a Treasury Secretary that isn’t in bed with the finance industry.
someone like bernie sanders is a miracle.
Dave
How’s this for a tool of an NY Fed chair?
John Hamilton Farr
Indeed. But nothing goes on forever.
kay
@JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN’s Official Stalker:
Great post. Here’s my question, though. They must know, in this industry, that they have a credibility problem. Not on making money, we know they can do that, but on ethics.
It doesn’t matter in the narrow realm in which this firm operates. But it does matter in a broader sense because the general public is going to conflate their suspicions about tax-payer funded profiteering to the whole finance sector. I hear it every day. The whole tone has changed. They think bankers are crooks (again, I know that this firm wouldn’t care about that).
Are they so politically plugged in, so powerful, so entrenched that they simply do not have to consider public perception?
We’re vulnerable, all of us, to their actions, as we’ve learned, but they are in no way accountable to us, even in a public relations/public perception sense? That’s powerful, and it’s wildly one-sided.
JA3
Has anyone in one of these threads pointed out that whatever the status of the overall economy, the markets had a great Q2? My fairly conservative 401K rose 15%.
I would hope that professional traders working with billions of dollars across a range of assets could make a heckuva lot better than 15%.
kay
@JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN’s Official Stalker:
Take another sector. Say, health care. What if the health care industry, largest players, not the whole group, decided they could be more profitable if they took more risk. That’s probably true, too, infection control measures ( as an example) must be costly.
They took that risk and then as a result of that insanity and greed there was a world-wide pandemic. Shareholders profited, and the health care industry itself profited, because there were all these infected people streaming in. Taxpayers spent billions to prop up the hospital networks, and mitigate the pandemic’s effect in the broader economy. Many of the largest hospitals failed. Hundreds of millions of people were infected. No relation to whether you actually entered one of the hospitals. They gambled, we all lost.
The moment the panic subsided, a major (remaining) player in health care announced they were again dispensing with infection control measures, to cut costs and increase profits, while increasing risk to patients and everyone else.
Would that fly? Would they get away with that? I don’t think they would.
burnspbesq
@kay:
Interesting and (I think) useful analogy. I think I ask the same question both in your hypothetical situation and in the real-world case of Goldman.
Tell me what Federal statute the behavior violates, and then tell me how you propose to go about proving it.
If you don’t have an answer for the first part of the question, then what you have is a gap in the legal/regulatory structure that needs to be fixed, and can probably only be fixed prospectively. Channel all of the rage that seems to be out there into constructive political action. And remember that it is possible for behavior to be outrageous but not illegal. It is in the nature of things that legislatures are generally neither omniscient nor proactive.
If you have an answer for the first part of the question, but not for the second, then it’s time to empanel a grand jury and start issuing subpoenas. Everybody from the CEO to the guy who empties the shredders will lawyer up, so be prepared to offer immunity to some people in order to get them to open up. Also don’t be surprised if the best you can do is get some people for obstruction or evidence-tampering. And be sure that your prosecutors don’t make the same mistakes that doomed the KPMG and Stevens cases.
burnspbesq
@JA3:
Fair point. Do let us know when your 401(k) is back to where it was in, say, Q3 of 2007.
Tim H.
Reminds me of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they go back and rob the same train twice because they think nobody will expect that.
kay
@burnspbesq:
I’m not outraged. I’m honestly baffled. I listen to Liz Cheney rattle on about how “we kept the country safe”, but, they didn’t. While people were doing what they do to survive, this financial pandemic was building, and no one stepped in. It was private companies, and the sanctity of contracts, and the risk inherent, and the vast majority of people didn’t and don’t understand why they are so vulnerable to this sector’s behavior.
I’m not expected to understand or plan for the vector of infectious disease. If I were asked to police that, on an individual basis, by petitioning my state legislature for specific regs governing infectious disease control, I couldn’t do my job. I wouldn’t have time.
I’m sure of one thing. If the health care industry took excessive risk and caused such suffering, they would not dismiss complaints or inquiry into their methods with such scorn. This firm addressed none of the issues raised in the Rolling Stone piece. They sneered. What other sector gets away with that behavior?
burnspbesq
@kay:
You may be less sure of that after you read this article, which was the lead in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nurse12-2009jul12,3,7225005.story
kay
@burnspbesq:
I guess I’m baffled (slightly) by your response, too. I don’t know: they’ll spend thousands of dollars to pursue one of my juvenile clients to the ends of the earth for making a half-ass attempt to break into a money changing machine at the car wash. They’ll interview ten people, and take statements. They’ll botch the whole thing with a coerced admission, and they’re back after the next one the next morning. They don’t just throw their hands up and say “this prosecution thing never works”.
kay
@burnspbesq:
Hah! I knew the health care industry was probably not the most reliable, but I liked the whole disease thing.
burnspbesq
My final word (and this time I mean it) on the Goldman thing.
Goldman were, and continue to be, better than anyone else at gaming the system. The system is open to being gamed that way because Republican Administrations and Republican-controlled Congresses abdicated their responsibilities to provide effective regulation of a rapidly-evolving sector.
It wasn’t Goldman whose answer to a recession that started when the tech-sector equity bubble burst was to create conditions that virtually ensured that a housing bubble would be created. That was Alan Greenspan.
Outrage is fine. Misdirected outrage isn’t constructive.
burnspbesq
@kay:
Not sure how to respond to that.
As a general observation, misallocation of law enforcement resources and inappropriate use of prosecutorial discretion are problems that we haven’t yet figured out how to solve, and may never figure out how to solve.
To a greater or lesser extent, effective Federal criminal law enforcement relies on the ambition of individuals to keep it pointed in the right direction. In my experience (and I know a number of such critters), substantially all U.S. Attorneys and a large number of AUSAs are ambitious people. While there are some folks in those offices who are content to be career prosecutors, I think the majority see it as a stepping stone to something else – whether that something else is elective office, the bench, or a seven-figure income as a defense lawyer. Ambitious people are always looking to make the big score, the high-profile conviction in the high-profile case that catapults them to the next level. See, e.g., Rudy Giuliani, who for all his other faults was a fantastic U.S. Attorney and locked up a lot of people who needed to be locked up.
If Goldman is dirty, and if there is a case to be made, I am confident that some prosecutor somewhere will try to make it.
kay
@burnspbesq:
I don’t object to anyone making money. I just want some mechanism to limit the downside of the risk they take to them.
As much as that is possible.
I think that’s where the outrage comes from. The feeling that we all are held hostage to this. I think people were shocked at how vulnerable they turned out to be, to instruments and processes they don’t understand, and to powerful people who are accountable to no one, as long as they don’t break the law.
RememberNovember
Somewhere out there Henry Paulson is sacrificing goats to the PT Barnum shrine.
To hell with Madoff, Paulson created the greatest Ponzi scheme and ran off with the dough.
RememberNovember
@Tim H.:
haha…yeah that pretty much sums it up.
Barry
burnspbesq
(snipped: a paragraph on the ambitions of prosecutors)
“If Goldman is dirty, and if there is a case to be made, I am confident that some prosecutor somewhere will try to make it.”
No, because that would be taking on the biggest of the Wall St boys, and the one with the best connections.
An ambitious prosecutor would be far better off prosecuting some small fry financial crook, who ripped off peole for *millions* of dollars!!!!! (gasp!!).
passerby
@JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN’s Official Stalker:
You do realize that you have proceeded to define things such that there can’t be a Treasury Secretary that isn’t in bed with the finance industry, right? If having a job like President of the NY Fed or Treasury Secretary makes you a tool,
Yes, I am aware. That is exactly my view of those who are engaged at those levels of finance.
then they will all be tools, with no exception.
Yep, you pretty much sum up my opinion, tools, no exceptions.
Maybe you should rely upon something a little less circular.
Why would I want to do that? You would have to explain how anyone can attain a top position in a financial institution, whether a bank or the Fed, without being “in on it”.
tc125231
@Fulcanelli: It’s exactly what you think. Please be careful who you kill.
Perry Como
But it was Goldman (Paulson) that lobbied to get the capital requirements lifted that led to insane leveraging by investment banks. Goldman isn’t some passive participant here that is just taking advantage of rules that are made in some far off land. Goldman is actively working to change the rules that lead to a destabilized financial system. And why shouldn’t they? They can make a ton of cash off of it. Fuck the plebes, daddy needs a new private dominatrix out on Long Island (true story, I knew an EVP at GS that paid a six figure salary and bought a house for his own private dominatrix. He was married and had kids).
Edit:
Also, we had someone who tried that, but the FBI used anti-terrorism laws to take him down for paying a prostitute when he became governor. Also.
Perry Como
In other news, Stanford’s shit is being auctioned off. Maybe some GS folks can use their windfall to buy some nice wines.
passerby
@passerby: @JMN Is Now asiangrrlMN’s Official Stalker:
Further, when BO selected T. Geithner as Treasury Sec, and there were rumblings about his being and “insider”, I defended Obama’s decision by stating that in order to get control and proper regulation of this industry, he would need someone as SoT who knew the ropes, someone who knew which levers to pull and buttons to push. Someone who knew his way around the rabbit holes.
Initially, my thought was he needed Geithner to help him do the rope-a-dope on predatory practices and Ponzi-like methods. Or, a less likely scenario where Geither was the dope-to-rope and in doing so would expose the financial chicanery.
For Obama to select anyone from a lesser position who was not familiar with those rabbit holes, would’ve been pure folly.
Obama needed someone who was/had been “in on it”.
tc125231
@a: Do you actually follow this stuff? This remark is pretty ignorant. AIG was highly profitable because it got 100 cents on the dollar on CDS liabilities with AIG –which paid them using government money provided by Hank Paulson –a Goldman alumni, as are Summers and Geithner.
Alan
This is a fun thread at True/Slant. You have to read the comments which include a few from Matt Taibbi.
JWW
John,
Just because you are investment stupid, doesn’t mean the rest of the world is. Why don’t you look at one or more of your clan that actually have money to invest. Not a hard project, and you will find that they are making money! The money they are making is not market money it is tax dollars.
That means your money, my money and your readers money. The real bad thing about this situation is they are making .75 cents on the $1.00 spent by our government. I see that you are willing to live with that ratio. If you open your mind that kinda means, each time you go to Mc’Donalds and buy a #5 for $6.00 and leave a $4.50 tip.
MBSS
hey alan, good link.
that was an epic thread. Deutsch is trounced, but her spirit
is indomitable, and she doesn’t fail to reply agreeably.