More good news about the Goldman boys and Tim Geithner:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York gave up much of its power in high-pressure negotiations with the American International Group’s trading partners last year, according to a government report made public on Monday.
Just two days before the New York Fed paid A.I.G.’s partners 100 cents on the dollar to tear up their contracts with the insurance giant, one bank volunteered to take a modest haircut — but it never got the chance.
UBS, of Switzerland, alone offered to give a break to the New York Fed in the negotiations last November over how to keep A.I.G. from toppling and taking other banks down with it. It would have accepted 98 cents on the dollar.
But UBS’s good-faith gesture was quickly drowned out by Goldman Sachs and the top French bank regulator. They argued, with others, that it would be improper and perhaps even criminal to force A.I.G.’s trading partners to bear losses outside of bankruptcy court.
The banks and the regulator were confident that the New York Fed was not willing to push A.I.G. into bankruptcy, because earlier in the fall the New York Fed had stepped in with $85 billion to prop up the insurer.
The New York Fed, led then by Timothy F. Geithner, who is now the Treasury secretary, therefore had little leverage in the negotiations, according to a post-mortem of what has emerged as the most inflammatory episode in the rescue of A.I.G.
In the Army, we had a saying called “Fuck up, move up.” Looks like that sure was the case for Geithner. And you just have to love the sense of entitlement from the Goldman boys- it would be illegal for them to not get paid in full! And, because of who they are and where their people are in our government, the gambit worked.
I seriously think Goldman Sachs and the folks like them are the biggest threat to the future of this country, but since they own everyone, they’ll just keep siphoning off the money until the nation collapses.