Free Republic

Just as the year end onslaught on the dollar was spearheaded to a climax by Blankfein’s minions, so did Europe finally decide to convulse under an unbearable lead of ridiculous mispriced “assets” and vomited up a whole load of troubling financial data, which spread from Greece to Austria to Ireland, setting sovereign CDS to multi month highs. Obviously, this did not help the weak dollar case and cost GS traders a few hundred million. A note to traders indicates that while Goldman has not lost the war of intergalactic domination, it too, can lose the occasional battles: Last Friday we...

Arnold Kling has a post on what he calls the Harvard-Goldman filter: The Harvard-Goldman filter works like this. 1. To get into a position of power, you have to pass through a filter. The easiest way to show that you can pass through the filter is to go to Harvard and then work for Goldman. 2. If you do not go to Harvard and work for Goldman, then you have to show that you can get along with people who did. 3. The best way to show that you can get along with people who pass the Harvard-Goldman filter is...

Goldman retreats from life settlements Fri Dec 18, 2009 2:27pm EST *Goldman decision follows Congressional hearing *Credit crunch crushes exotic securities By Matthew Goldstein NEW YORK, Dec 18 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs (GS.N) is quietly backing away from life settlements--- the business of buying life insurance policies from aging Americans in the hopes of collecting on the death benefit. The Wall Street investment bank is ending its involvement with a "mortality index" it launched in December 2007 with high expectations. A Goldman spokesman confirmed the decision. Goldman's QXX index tracks the life expectancy of a group of people aged 65...

Wall Street sees carbon trading and related derivative products as the next big thing in financial innovation. Critics say it's the next big financial mess. Carbon trading provides a way for companies to stimulate green energy and carbon reduction projects by financing them through the purchase of carbon credits. Such trading has slowed over the past year or so amid uncertainty about regulations and global emissions targets. Eventually, though, many expect carbon trading to balloon into a multitrillion-dollar business. FOE and other environmental groups have been pressing the Senate to pass legislation that puts strict limits on banks' involvement in...

"...The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes. The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong. For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known...

Brooke masters of the FT reports that Pension fund sues Goldman board: A pension fund for fire and police officers has sued the board of Goldman Sachs, seeking to stop the investment bank from paying out billions of dollars in bonuses to the bank's staff, writes Brooke Masters in London. Lawyers representing the Security Police and Fire Professionals of America Retirement Fund argue that the board has "abdicated" its responsibility to shareholders and "blindly "rewarded" executives for "corporate performance that has absolutely nothing to do with the skill of the company's employees". The lawsuit, filed in New York late on...

I trust my banker more than I trust my president. And after Imam Obama’s photo op with the Wall Street types yesterday, it’s not even close. I side with the capitalists. Obama the Arrogant is no friend of mine. And for a guy with the lowest first-year popularity rating in the history of the presidency, he’s pretty generous with that self-assigned “solid B-plus” grade he claimed in the Oprah interview. Now that’s hard-hitting journalism -- Oprah Winfrey asking Barack Obama how much he loves himself. Turns out, he loves himself quite a bit. And it turns out we have to...

NLPC has filed a shareholder proposal asking Goldman Sachs to report on the science behind its embrace of global warming in the wake of the ‘Climategate’ scandal. Goldman’s ‘climate policy’ is more than corporate public relations. In 2007, Goldman participated in the buyout of energy firm TXU. The transaction resulted in the cancelation of 8 of 11 planned coal-fired power plants after pressure from environmental activists. It might make wealthy financiers in New York City feel good about themselves to scotch electric generation in the name of environmentalism, but it has negative consequences for ordinary people. Electricity is a basic...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) played a bigger role in fueling the mortgage bets that crippled American Insurance Group Inc (AIG.N) than has been publicly disclosed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. An analysis by the paper of AIG's trades on pools of mortgage debt shows that Goldman was a key player in many, including those involving other banks, the Journal said. Goldman was one of 16 banks the U.S. government rescued last year after closing out losing trades that AIG had made with the financial firms. The bank originated or bought protection from AIG on...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. played a bigger role than has been publicly disclosed in fueling the mortgage bets that nearly felled American Insurance Group Inc. Goldman was one of 16 banks paid off when the U.S. government last year spent billions closing out soured trades that AIG made with the financial firms. A Wall Street Journal analysis of AIG's trades, which were on pools of mortgage debt, shows that Goldman was a key player in many of them, even the ones involving other banks. Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of...

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired...

Obama's Big Wall Street Sellout The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel...

Over at HuffPo, SEIU president Andy Stern is calling for Goldman Sachs "to come clean." This, keep in mind, is the same Andy Stern who is on public record visiting President Obama at the White House more times than anyone else in the entire #$%&ng world. In Stern's column, he mentions that "Last month, hundreds of ordinary Americans gathered outside Goldman's Washington, D.C. headquarters to demand the firm clean up its act." "Hundreds" is a bit of a stretch and it wasn't "ordinary" Americans. It was ONLY SEIU members and members of George Goehl's National People's Action Network. I know....

The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that there have now been 1,000,000 foreclosures filed so far in 2009 and the group expects the foreclosure number to double before the end of the year. U.S. Home Vacancies Hit 18.7 Million on Bank Seizures (Update2) [1] Thanks to our controlled and uncontrolled media, we know when you take the derivative of the foreclosure crisis you get those greedy predatory lenders at AIG, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America plotting to steal our tacky (I mean tract-y) houses. Conventional wisdumb and the media always blame the usual suspects and FOX News wraps it...

On Saturday, joined by hundreds of friends, family and colleagues on a snowy December day in Yonkers, NY, we celebrated the life of Mark Pittman. Readers of The IRA who wish to express their thanks to Mark and show support for his family may make contributions to the Pittman Children’s College Fund, c/o Dr. William Karesh, 30B Pondview Road, Rye, NY 10580. Bob Ivry from Bloomberg News gave a remembrance of Mark, including reading the letter that his daughter Maggie Pittman posted on zerohedge to dispel rumors that her dad might have been murdered. Some members of the zerohedge family...

Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the mêlée surrounds an email in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, 17 days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history. As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for...

Amazing story here.... you really need to read the whole thing. The salient point is here: The county paid JPMorgan and a group of banks $120.2 million in fees for $5.8 billion of derivatives, according to a series of stories published by Bloomberg News in 2005. The payments were about $100 million more than they should have been based on prevailing rates, according to estimates in 2007 by James White, an adviser the county hired after the SEC said it was investigating the deals. That's six times what they should have cost - that is, six hundred percent of market...

JPMorgan Chase & Co. lists lots of assets, ranging from loans to securities to cash, on its $2 trillion balance sheet. Not to be found is one that might be its most valuable -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. For JPMorgan, No. 1 in the too-big-to-fail bank club, Goldman has become the perfect lightning rod for populist outrage that might otherwise be directed at it. That has helped shield JPMorgan from questions about its own size, profits and payouts even as it reaps many of the same rewards as Goldman. Not a week goes by, for example, without what seems like...

Even Timmy is slowly realizing that the Administration will need to find a way to deflect Main Steet's anger at Goldman and keep it focused exclusively on Wall Street instead of equating it with Obama et al. The problem is - you make some very serious, tentacled enemies in the process. Geithner also flip flops on his prior position on the transaction tax. While before he was more opposed to the transaction tax than even Marla, his new "windsocked" position on the topic may now provide a challenge even to Nitric Oxide inhibitors. But here is the clincher for the...

A senior Chinese official criticized foreign banks for selling derivatives with “fraudulent characteristics” that led to heavy losses for state-owned airlines and other companies. “Some international investment banks are the biggest villains,” said Li Wei, deputy chairman of the agency that oversees China’s biggest state companies, in a commentary in this week’s edition of the Study Times, a newspaper published by the school of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The comments were the Chinese government’s most pointed public criticism yet of foreign institutions. Li’s agency said in September it would support companies that want to challenge the contracts in court....

The man who brought down Galleon is not finished, and if the report by Reuters' Matt Goldstein is correct, FBI special agent B.J. Kang may well have his sights set on the top of the hedge fund pantheon: SAC Capital itself. This is not a surprise to Zero Hedge, and is something we have speculated on in the past, however the intricacies of such a spectacular take down would have to be refined beyond any reasonable doubt as any allegations against Mr. Cohen will likely see the involvement of every single $1,000/hour billing lawyer in the world, taking on any...

To get a sense of what Goldman Sachs (GS) has pulled off in the last two years, consider: Goldman Sachs was directly responsible for creating, marketing, and trading many of the toxic financial instruments behind the mortgage crisis and resulting recession. The bank's irresponsible behavior nearly caused its collapse, and taxpayers had to bail it out. Public funds saved Goldman Sachs, which this year is minting money and watching its stock soar. Last month, two Goldman vice chairmen quietly sold $55 million worth of company stock and pocketed the cash. And there you have it: from your IRS check to...

A senior Chinese official who oversees the country's largest state-owned enterprises has publicly slammed Western investment banks for "maliciously" peddling complicated derivative products that caused huge losses for Chinese companies over the last year. In Beijing's strongest criticism on the matter to date, Li Wei, vice director of the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, singled out Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup in a long and highly critical article in the latest issue of an official Communist party newspaper. The large losses suffered by Chinese state companies were "closely associated with the intentionally complex and highly leveraged...

When an insolvent American International Group distributed $165m in executive bonuses last winter, the public was outraged. But this was small change compared with what we have learnt recently from a federal auditor’s report on the US insurance group, almost 80 per cent owned by the US government. At the direction of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, AIG quietly gave $62bn to pay in full the claims of Goldman Sachs, Barclays and other large investors. Why did US taxpayers pay so much to the sophisticated clients of AIG when we could have spent much less to settle these...

Neighbors frequently bicker over shrubbery (seriously), but it is not every day that one neighbor just knocks down the greens-in-question. When a relative stranger complains to Lloyd Blankfein about it, it's downright unusual. It's even more bizarre when the knockee is a significant client of the knocker. That's exactly what happened to Jim Chanos, the president of Kynikos Associates, who voiced his grievances about an incident involving the hedges on his Hamptons property to Goldman's CEO. Luckily, he lived to tell the tale to Bethany McLean. In a big Vanity Fair article, McLean details the incident, which involved Marc Spilker,...

Washington (CNN) – Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is engaged, a spokesman for the former president confirms to CNN. Chelsea Clinton will marry longtime boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky, said the spokesman, who added that reports earlier this summer about the engagement and wedding had been "completely false."

CHELSEA Clinton is not getting married this year, despite constant rumors of impending nuptials. Maybe the former first daughter or her fiancé, Marc Mezvinsky, just isn't ready yet.

NEW YORK -- Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton has become engaged to her longtime boyfriend. Matt McKenna, a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, confirmed that 29-year old Chelsea and investment banker Marc Mezvinsky got engaged on Thanksgiving and announced it in an e-mail to friends.

I never felt any longing to go to Orlando, Florida. What I felt, in traveling south to volunteer for the campaign of George W. Bush, was an obligation. Let me explain by first saying something about the critics of our president. A great many of them like to laugh at George Bush for not reading books and for being uninterested in visiting other countries. But a lot of those same people are guilty of the opposite offense. They prefer to read books and travel abroad rather than actually getting to know their own country face to face. These critics do...

Without a Prayer Subtitle: John McCain can't stand sucking up to the Christian right. Is this the end of the GOP's unholy alliance? "The Bible-thumpers, mainly working- and middle-class whites with limited educations from the landlocked states of the South and the Midwest, would seem to have had little in common with the archpriests of the neoconservative movement, who as it happened were mainly Jewish academics with fancy degrees from the East and West Coasts. But they did: They shared an almost equal disdain for democracy, free speech and learning, and paradise for both groups was an intellectually mute America...

When American citizens assert conservative principles, as they did last week with the tea party protests, it has a strange effect on liberals. They get angry. Some get in touch with their inner Beavis and Butthead, giggling endlessly over lame sexual innuendo. Some, like Rolling Stone political reporter Matt Taibbi, just get downright misogynistic. In a blog post on tax day, Taibbi sleazed conservative writer Michelle Malkin, who supported and wrote about the tea parties. “I have to say, I’m really enjoying this whole teabag thing,” Taibbi wrote. “It’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it’s brought together...

Goldman Arming Itself? :-> This is a riot (well, ok, I might be a week - or a month early on that): Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the...

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank...

Another Goldman employee marries into the power-borg The former First Daughter and her investment banker boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky became engaged before Thanksgiving, ABC News' Jake Tapper reports. Via Tapper's "Political Punch" blog: The two sent out an email the morning of Friday November 27 saying: "We're sorry for the mass email but we wanted to wish everyone a belated Happy Thanksgiving! We also wanted to share that we are engaged! We didn't get married this past summer despite the stories to the contrary, but we are looking toward next summer and hope you all will be there to celebrate with...

Investors face huge losses as Dubai abandons debt company Dubai has brought in Deloitte, the accountancy firm, to help restructure Dubai World David Robertson The Government of Dubai said today that it will not stand behind its wholly-owned subsidiary Dubai World, prompting fears that the company’s creditors could lose billions of dollars. Today's comment, from Abdulrahman al-Saleh, the director general of Dubai’s Department of Finance, effectively confirms that country does not have enough money to repay Dubai World’s $60 billion of liabilities. Deloitte, the accountancy firm, has been called in to restructure the giant business. Last week, the state-owned conglomerate...

The carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market, according to the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU's emissions trading scheme. The ETS market may see $3tn (£1.8tn) worth of transactions a year in the next decade or two, according to Andrew Ager, head of emissions trading at Bache Commodities in London, with it even being used as a hedge against falling equities or rising inflation. "It is still a relatively new industry with annual trades of around €300bn every year. But this could grow to around $3tn compared...

The role of fat cat climate profiteers' bundled contributions in so-called "climate legislation"We read in our morning paper that the Obama Administration promises that proposed carbon regulations will cost American families less than a dollar a day, and will reduce deaths from air pollution. The latter proposition is an outright fraud because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; our lungs always contain a far higher concentration than the air around any coal-fired power plant. Obama's dishonest efforts to equate carbon dioxide to genuine pollutants like sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, mercury, and so on shows just how eager he is to...

California's gubernatorial primary is still 10 months away, but the multimillion-dollar race for campaign cash has already picked up a quick pace, with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman at the front of the pack. It's no surprise that the billionaire Internet exec, who has never held elected office, has lots of money in the bank to spend on her campaign. According to a tally Saturday, she has some $19 million in cash available--and that's after spending $6.1 million to get her campaign operations up and running. It's also after she contributed first $4 million, then $15 million of her own...

(snip) I am concerned, however, that a number of the legislative proposals being circulated would significantly reduce the capacity of the Federal Reserve to perform its core functions. Notably, some leading proposals in the Senate would strip the Fed of all its bank regulatory powers. And a House committee recently voted to repeal a 1978 provision that was intended to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence. These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the...

As we have been reading the latest coverage on the AIG bailout from the SIGTARP report and the Treasury Secretary Geithner’s Congressional testimony, a nagging question remains unresolved: why did AIG get bailed out but the monoline bond insurers did not? . . . I hate to get sucked into the vampire squid line of thinking about Goldman, but the only explanation i can think of for why AIG got rescued and the monolines did not is because Goldman had significant exposure to AIG and did not have exposure to the monolines. When it became clear that AIG could face...

Let us now praise Goldman Sachs, for the sole reason that it and it alone among the major, capital-intensive Wall Street institutions – both recently deceased and still living – actually understands something about risk and risk-taking. By his own admission, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive, ranks risk management as his number one daily priority, even ahead of doing God’s work. “I’m a risk manager and I’ve been that for a long time, a lot longer than I’ve been CEO,” he said recently at a breakfast in New York sponsored by Fortune magazine. “I live 98 per cent of my...

The 70% Discount on Goldman's $500M Gift IT’S BEEN DUBBED the apology with a half-billion-dollar gift attached. In an attention-grabbing move this week, Goldman Sachs (GS: 173.26*, +3.25, +1.91%) said it would launch a $500 million initiative to help small businesses with Warren Buffett as a key adviser, an announcement that coincided by hours with a public mea culpa from CEO Lloyd Blankfein for mistakes in the financial crisis. But it turns out Goldman’s program includes its own discount — the kind that only an investment banker could love. According to a review of Goldman’s program by SmartMoney in consultation...

November 23, 2009 Globetrotting puts 'official' figures into perspective One constant surprise for me is the emotional state of the discussions I encounter about the health of the UK economy Jim O’Neill For much of the period since the end of the summer, I have been travelling around the world for my exciting but demanding job. I have been to Brazil, China, twice, once on a very long trip, Hong Kong, Singapore, Turkey and to many places in Europe. One constant surprise for me is the emotional state of the discussions I encounter about the health of the UK economy....

A New York Times editorial slammed Goldman Sachs for its role in the financial crisis and said that instead of paying big bonuses to its employees it should make a multibillion-dollar gift to help reduce the U.S. national debt. The editorial, published November 21, attacked Goldman for everything from its top executive's failure to apologize properly for his investment bank's part in creating the crisis as well as Goldman's awarding of bonuses related to profits that the paper said were boosted by a government bailout. The Times sniffed at Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein's acknowledgment last week that his bank "participated...

Bombshells are falling in light of the new report from Neil M. Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Derivatives specialist Janet Tavakoli of Tavakoli Structured Finance is calling for the undoing of what she views as essentially a Goldman bailout. Here's NYT's Gretchen Morgenstern with the backstory: The Fed, under Mr. Geithner’s direction, caved in to A.I.G.’s counterparties, giving them 100 cents on the dollar for positions that would have been worth far less if A.I.G. had defaulted. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Société Générale and other banks were in the group that got full value for...

Goldman Sachs employees can't help themselves when they see a buck. In the name of doing "God's work," Lloyd Blankfein apparently is going along with the GS is evil mantra and is going to screw GS shareholders and keep more GS money for himself and his GS top dogs. Despite record net income and compensation at Goldman, analysts expect its 2009 earnings per share to be 22% lower than in 2007. The decline is caused by GS issuing more than 100 million shares in the past year to bolster Goldman's financial position and capital. Major shareholders have said that reining...

(snip) "We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret," said Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein. "We apologize." Blankfein had told a British newspaper the other day that Goldman was doing “God’s work”. That caused a firestorm online. (snip)

Dear Lloyd Blankfein: You know it, don’t you? You know that it doesn’t matter. You can’t win. You could shed tears in an hour-long mea culpa on Oprah! You could pay yourself no more than one dollar for the next ten years. You could pledge $5 billion to a hundred of Barney Frank’s favorite charities. meanstreet And it still wouldn’t matter. The public anger towards Goldman is just too hardened. In an economy full of losers, everyone is fixated on hating the winner. And that kind of hate doesn’t just go away. It takes time to dissipate. And, unfortunately, the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) could have suffered dramatic losses if the federal government had not intervened to prop up American International Group Inc (AIG.N), according to a government report. The report by the special inspector general for the government bailout program raises doubts about Goldman's previous claims that it was hedged against potential AIG losses. Last fall, as the financial services industry stood on the brink of collapse, the government stepped in with an unprecedented effort to rescue the system. AIG was among the companies that received billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury's Troubled...

Sorry Lloyd: NO SALE “We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret,” Blankfein, 55, said at a conference in New York hosted by the Directorship magazine. “We apologize.” But then there's this... Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, had a record profit in the first nine months of this year and set aside $16.7 billion for compensation expenses. No they didn't. Their "profit" was entirely ill-gotten. About $10 billion from the government via the AIG conduit, which they had a ZERO chance of collecting had AIG filed bankruptcy. Another $21...