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The private-equity tycoon Stephen A. Schwarzman, backed by an array of mostly western blue-chip companies with interests in China, is creating a $300 million scholarship for study in China that he hopes will rival the Rhodes scholarship in prestige and influence. The programme, whose endowment represents one of the largest single gifts to education in the world and one of the largest philanthropic gifts ever in China, was announced by Mr. Schwarzman in Beijing on Sunday. The Schwarzman Scholars programme will pay all expenses for 200 students each year from around the world for a one-year master’s programme at Tsinghua...

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. is out with his new book, On the Brink, where he details his version of events that occurred on Wall Street and Washington D.C.during the financial crisis while he was Treasury Secretary. All that you really need to know about this fairy tale can be found in the front of the book in what is labeled as "Author's Notes". In this preface, Paulson tells us that he doesn't take notes and doesn't use email and his staff was frustrated because he didn't send out memos, but fortunately, he tells us, he has a very...

"This troubles me deeply as a Republican, but it troubles me even more as an American," said Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive who spearheaded the 2008 Wall Street bank bailout as treasury secretary. "Enough is enough," he wrote. "It's time to put country before party and say it together: Never Trump." Instead, he offered up Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, as the country's best alternative to Trump, encouraging his GOP colleagues to consider her when casting their ballot.

Henry Paulson, a Republican who was U.S. Treasury secretary during the 2008 financial meltdown, on Friday called a Donald Trump presidency “unthinkable” and said he will vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Paulson joins a growing list of establishment Republicans who say they will not cast a ballot in the Nov. 8 election for Trump, the party’s presumptive nominee and a political neophyte whose populist rhetoric runs counter to many long-held Republican principles. […] “I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and...

It was 8 degrees in Minneapolis on a recent January day, and out on Interstate 394, snow whipped against the windshields of drivers on their morning commutes. But inside the offices of Cargill, the food conglomerate, Greg Page, the company’s executive chairman, felt compelled to talk about global warming. Mr. Page is a member of the Risky Business Project, an unusual collection of business and policy leaders determined to prepare American companies for climate change. It’s a prestigious club, counting a former senator, five former White House cabinet members, two former mayors and two billionaires in the group. The 10...

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama will nominate businessman John Bryson to lead the Commerce Department, a White House official said Tuesday. Bryson's appointment brings another private sector player into an administration that has been making a concerted effort to improve its relationship with the business community.

Both of these videos are from Monday evening, April 26th. The Financial Times article is from this Sunday. They are elements of the most extensive scandal perhaps, since original sin. While the Beck video is even much more significant than this, the point is that Barack Obama nixed real reform in the Obamafinance bill. The transparency would have gotten in the way of the astounding plan of which he is a focal point. This entire interview is important, but be sure to listen, after the two minute mark, as Greta Van Susteren interviews Senator Jim DeMint.

This looks pretty bad for both Goldman and Greece, as if things could look worse. According to a scathing piece in Der Spiegel, European statisticians in Luxembourg have had a very difficult time getting proper Greek economic and financial data for years. Worse yet, Goldman Sachs appears to have been helping Greece take advantage of a European regulatory loophole in order to understate its deficits: Der Spiegel:

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....

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...

If you haven't read Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs, make sure to get your hands on it ASAP. It's a must read on how Goldman Sachs and the U.S. government work hand in glove to produce giant investment bubbles... bubbles that allow Goldman to work over investors for hundreds of billions of dollars. We don't think you can lay all the blame for the housing bubble and the tech bubble at Goldman's feet... but we do find it suspicious that a ton of high level government posts are staffed by Goldman employees. It's close to a...

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...

June 28, 2006, 7:12 a.m. Bears a Close WatchChina knows our next Treasury secretary well. By Frank Gaffney Jr. As the Senate Finance Committee considers President Bush’s nomination of Henry Paulson to be the next secretary of the Treasury, the question is not whether he will be confirmed. That seems assured, as senators in both parties behave like star-struck groupies in the presence of a Wall Street “master of the universe,” whose net worth, from his time as a senior executive of Goldman Sachs, is estimated to be on the order of $600 million. Rather, the question is: Will any...

The integrity of the government's bailout actions are called into question by a new report. There's a lot at stake. A new report by the New York Attorney General says that government officials bullied Bank of America Chief Ken Lewis into accepting a merger with Merrill Lynch--then ordered him to keep mum about losses at Merrill. What's at stake? The integrity of the government's bailout actions, for one. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's reputation, for another. And of course Lewis' job. Thursday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released documents charging that in December former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pressured...

Doing the kind of investigative reporting we should expect from the major media, a financial research and consulting firm has released a major analysis of the “credit crisis” that concludes that the claims made by Treasury Department Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to justify a socialist takeover of the financial industry were demonstrably false. The analysis, Flawed Assumptions about the Credit Crisis: A Critical Examination of US Policymakers,concludes that the result of the unjustified massive federal intervention in the economy could be similar to the economic crisis in the Weimar Republic of 1922, where disastrous hyperinflation...

A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks. “Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report. The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique...

If “cash is king,” then Middle East coffers are irresistibly enticing. During a recent tour of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt applauded the “growing role” of Arab banks in the U.S. economy. Treasury is seeking buyers for its newly acquired bailout assets because more than $1 trillion in cash is urgently needed to rescue the largest U.S. banks. However, cash from the Arabian Gulf comes with a vital string attached: Islamic banking, erroneously viewed as an ancient practice. In fact, Islamic banking is a newly invented institution: “Neither classical nor medieval Islamic civilization featured...

In "Uncle Shariah" in the Washington Times, December 16, Frank Gaffney details why AIG's nationalization is so worrisome: The insurance giant AIG has lately become the poster child for corporate risk-taking, mismanagement and greed. Its unimaginably large losses, rooted in insurance it extended to financial companies engaged in subprime mortgage-backed transactions, have destroyed both AIG's corporate reputation and balance sheet. Indeed, but for the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - who during his days running Goldman Sachs had extensive ties to AIG - deemed the insurance firm "too large to fail," the company would surely have gone under by...