From the no shit department:
Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have been widely praised for engineering the Wall Street bailouts, which avoided systemic chaos, and they’ll probably get more plaudits if the government recovers much of the $400 billion in loans it made to financial institutions.
However, while Paulson has been criticized, unfairly or not, because $12.9 billion of the bailout money went to Goldman, he’s drawn little scrutiny for what he did in his first 18 months in office, during the final frenzied stages of the housing bubble.
In his eight years as Goldman’s chief executive, Paulson had presided over the firm’s plunge into the business of buying up subprime mortgages to marginal borrowers and then repackaging them into securities, overseeing the firm’s huge positions in what became a fraud-infested market.
During Paulson’s first 15 months as the treasury secretary and chief presidential economic adviser, Goldman unloaded more than $30 billion in dicey residential mortgage securities to pension funds, foreign banks and other investors and became the only major Wall Street firm to dramatically cut its losses and exit the housing market safely. Goldman also racked up billions of dollars in profits by secretly betting on a downturn in home mortgage securities.
“No one was better positioned . . . than Mr. Paulson to understand exactly what the implications of his moving against the (housing) bubble would have been for Goldman Sachs, because he knew what the Goldman Sachs positions were,” said William Black, a former senior thrift regulator who delivered the harshest criticism of the former secretary.
Paulson “knew that if he acted the way he should, that would have burst the bubble. Then Goldman Sachs would have been left with a very substantial loss, and that would have been the end of bonuses at Goldman Sachs.”
Why, that’s just crazy talk you dirty fucking hippie. Everyone knows it is just crazy conspiratorial talk to suggest that Goldman Sachs was assisted by the fact that so many of her former employees are in high-ranking government jobs that she is jokingly referred to as Government Sachs. It’s just crazy talk to suggest that one reason Goldman is still thriving and her competitors like Lehman are dead and buried is because of her influence. It’s just conspiratorial nonsense to suggest that Goldman got all of her idiotic AIG bets paid off at 100 cents on the dollar because of government intervention. It’s just crazy to suggest the reason they never had to take a haircut on their idiocy was because of the role the Goldman boys played in Treasury and elsewhere.
Get out of here with your crazy conspiracies, you pinko commie traitor. Why do you hate capitalism? Everyone knows the real reason this worked out this way is because let’s face it- Goldman Sachs employees are just smarter and better than you. They earned those bonuses. They eat what they kill, remember.
Such Conspiratorial Talk Should be MockedPost + Comments (77)