Free Republic

**SNIP** Over the last 16 months, Clinton raked in at least $30 million - chiefly, the New York Times reports, from closed-to-the-press speeches to corporations, banks, etc. Care to bet on any other ex-secretary of state being so "lucky"? Interest in just what Clinton could deliver in exchange for such largesse has prompted many requests over the last year for transcripts. She has consistently refused. For the record, we doubt it's anything too shocking. Most likely, she just doesn't want to be outed as having been kissy-kissy with the likes of Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein. Why give a gift to...

According to recent FEC filings, top political donors at Goldman Sachs shifted their giving to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)79% in the last three months of last year. Jeb Bush had been the top recipient of donations from the Wall Street investment bank. Donations to Bush shrank to a trickle as his campaign faded. The most recent filing covers contributions and expenses between October and December. Marco Rubio’s campaign received $107,000 from Goldman Sachs executives. This number likely does not include donations to various Super PACs tied to Rubio’s candidacy. One of the bank’s lobbyists, Joseph Wall, is a campaign...

The Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, already facing scrutiny for not disclosing a Goldman Sachs loan he used for his 2012 Senate campaign, also failed to disclose a second loan, from Citibank, for the same race, according to a letter he sent Thursday to federal election officials. The one-page letter said that the “underlying source” of money for a series of personal loans Mr. Cruz made to his Senate campaign in Texas included both bank loans, which totaled as much as $1 million. Both loans were “inadvertently omitted” from the required filings, the letter said. Previously, Mr. Cruz has only...

It has been 20 years since the O.J. Simpson murder trial, but Kris Jenner says she is still haunted by the red flags she said she missed at the end of Nicole Brown Simpson’s life. The reality-TV star and businesswoman, 59, and her late ex-husband, Robert Kardashian, were close to O.J. Simpson, so much so that Simpson was even one of the groomsmen at their wedding in 1978. But that relationship became strained after Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, who had divorced the retired football star, were both found slain in Los Angeles June 12, 1994. Though Simpson was...

Members of a major left-wing dark money outfit are providing large chunks of cash for, and serving as top advisers and officers of, President Barack Obama’s personal advocacy group. Democracy Alliance donors have contributed at least $1.87 million to Organizing for Action (OFA), the 501(c)(4) organization that evolved out of Obama’s reelection campaign, according to data released by OFA. Democracy Alliance members also have official roles in running OFA. According to Democracy Alliance documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, OFA’s board of directors includes four Democracy Alliance “partners,” individuals who pay $30,000 in annual dues and contribute at least...

News about the spread of the Ebola virus has been an increasing focus for market participants in recent days. Despite rising media coverage, Ebola seems to have had little discernible effect on consumer sentiment to date. However, as Goldman Sachs notes, the "fear factor" associated with Ebola appears more significant than in past instances of pandemic concern. While expert opinion sees the likelihood of a significant outbreak of Ebola in the US as very low, it is likely any negative macroeconomic consequences are most likely to be transmitted through fear or risk-aversion channels.

A Goldman Sachs managing director has died following an apparent kiteboarding accident, police said. The body of 39-year-old Nicholas Valtz was found floating off Lazy Point in Napeague Harbor, Long Island, on Sunday. The amateur kiteboarder was still attached to his kite, while his gear was scattered in a grassy area of the harbor. The East Hampton Star reported the Brooklyn resident went kiteboarding early in the morning. When he failed to return by 2pm, relatives he was staying with at a Bridgehampton home called police. 'We’re deeply saddened by this tragedy and our thoughts are with Nick’s family,' Goldman...

Joe Weisenthal June 9, 2014 Goldman's top economist, Jan Hatzius, just said the words we've been wanting to hear for five years. He believes the economy is now growing at an above-trend pace. Goldman's own proprietary current activity indicator (CAI) is showing its fastest growth since the crisis, and though he acknowledges that some of the strong May activity is the result of a snapback from a tough winter, he says that even without that snapback we're still growing at a strong rate. Here's his statement: Despite the 1% drop in real GDP in the first quarter, we believe that...

Seventeen years after her brother Ron’s brutal murder, Kim Goldman wrote to O.J. Simpson in jail. “I’m sure it’s really weird to be getting a letter but you’ve been on my mind recently,” Goldman, 42, wrote in 2011. “I realize our few interactions have not been great — but I am wondering if you would grant me a visitation, to let me get to know the real you.” It was a stunning act of forgiveness, and it was just that — an act. Her real goal was to savor the sight of the disgraced gridiron great humiliated in prison, she...

General Electric agreed to buy oilfield services provider Lufkin Industries to expand its profitable oil and gas business. GE, the world's biggest maker of jet engines and electric turbines, has expanded in the energy industry with a series of acquisitions of companies that make equipment used in oil and gas production, while divesting assets in finance and media industries. The company has spent about $11 billion in acquisitions since 2007 to boost its presence in the oil and gas business, which is the conglomerate's fastest-growing and which contributes about 10 percent of its total revenue. Lufkin will broaden GE's artificial...

FORMER GOLDMAN BANKER: I Miss The Great Recession Already Michael, Bankers AnonymousJanuary 24, 2013 I’m just going to come out and say it, ok? I miss the Great Recession already. I miss it for two reasons: first as an investor and second as a human. The Investment Side of the Great Recession As an investor, the Great Recession represented the good times, now past.[1] Recessions – or at least their financial unfolding via changes in asset prices – cause not only wealth destruction, but also wealth creation. For investors[2] in particular, a recession is often necessary in order to deploy...

GOLDMAN: Gold Is Going To $1200 Matthew BoeslerJanuary 17, 2013The bank's central thesis is that the U.S. economic recovery finally takes off in 2013, and Goldman expects that to drive a selloff in the gold market as investors rotate away from traditional "safe-haven" investments. At the time, the analysts wrote, "We lower our 3-, 6- and 12-mo gold price forecasts to $1,825/toz, $1,805/toz and $1,800/toz and introduce a $1,750/toz 2014 forecast. While we see potential for higher gold prices in early 2013, we see growing downside risks." Now, Goldman has decided to up the ante a bit. Yesterday, its commodity...

In the film "My Brother the Serial Killer," set to air Wednesday on the Investigation Discovery network, Clay Rogers, the brother of convicted serial killer Glen Rogers, claims Glen murdered Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman—the pair Simpson was accused—and controversially acquitted—of slaying in 1995.

That dismal June retail sales report is causing a mass GDP-forecast-slashing parade on Wall Street. Here's Goldman's Jan Hatzius... Retail sales declined by 0.5% (month-over-month) in June, while the consensus had looked for a 0.2% gain. Key details of the report were also weaker: non-auto retail sales declined by 0.4%, and growth in April was revised down. Similarly, “core”/control retail sales (ex-autos, gasoline and building materials) was weak, declining 0.1% in June. The weakness reflected lower sales across a variety of categories, including general merchandise stores, electronics, furniture, sporting goods stores, and health and personal care retailers. Merely food and...

Goldman Sachs' (GS) analysts told investors to sell the S&P 500 (SPX) Thursday and boy did they ever. The S&P 500, which was already down 1%, dropped even further as Goldman's report bounced around email inboxes. Goldman's analysts said they could see the S&P 500 drop to 1,285, roughly 5% below its current levels. Heading into the close, the broad index was down more than 2% at 1,326. Analysts Noah Weisberger and Aleksandar Timcenko cited the sharp drop in the Philly Fed index Thursday as just another piece of evidence that the ephemeral recovery has lost steam. "We now think,...

Mario Draghi - 2002-2005: Vice Chairman and Managing Director at Goldman Sachs International In other words, Draghi was a key executive at Goldman at precisely the time when none other than Goldman Sachs was hired to create and facilitate the active hiding of the true extent of the Greek debt problem. In yet other words: could it be that none other than the head of the European Central Bank is refusing to cooperate with a Bloomberg FOIA, something even the US Federal Reserve ultimately succumbed to which led the revelation that the Fed had handed out trillions in secret loans...

<p>It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.</p>

Would America be a better place without Goldman Sachs? Of course it would. The "vampire squid" of Wall Street does not care about the future of America. Sadly, Goldman Sachs apparently does not even care much about their own clients. What Goldman Sachs is all about is making as much money as humanly possible. In the end, there is nothing wrong with making money, but there are constructive ways to make money and there are destructive ways to make money. Unfortunately, Goldman Sachs seems to find the destructive path almost irresistible. Greg Smith, the head of the U.S. equity...

| Share Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012 THE ZEIT GIST Threatened Goldman Japan workers unionize Financial giant butts against tough domestic labor law as it seeks to slim down workforce By JAMES MCCROSTIE The past year has been anything but business as usual for the financial industry. Faced with a frosty economic climate, financial service companies have been busy chopping dead wood. Last year, 200,000 financial service jobs ended up on the cutting block worldwide. In Japan, that meant layoffs at famous firms including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Mizuho Financial Group, and the not-so-famous, such as Spanish bank Bilbao Vizcaya...

Have a column on Iowa coming soon, but first, a quick but absurd note from the world of high finance. It seems Jim O'Neill, the head of Goldman's Asset Management department, is predicting that the United States stock market may go up "15 to 20 percent." O'Neill apparently believes Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve will resort to another round of money-printing, and finally green-light the long-awaited "Qe3," or third round of "Quantitative Easing." The QE programs involve the Fed printing hundreds of billions of dollars and pumping them into the marketplace, where they ostensibly stimulate the economy (although recent...