[rightwingcrazy]

Lloyd Blankfein, the 54-year-old chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, is powerfully perplexed. In the past six months, his investment-banking and securities-trading firm has roared ahead in profitability by taking risks — that other firms would not — for itself and its clients in an edgy market.

The perception is that, in high risk/reward investments that they make, Goldman takes almost all the reward, and the US taxpayer takes almost all the risk. In other words, the game is rigged, so it shouldn't be shocking that people are resentful.

[mysterio]

If GS didn’t want the public’s ire, it should have not participated in fascism.

[Frantzie]

There Russian software programmer in jail for allegedly stealing GS software that he worked on. The U.S. Attorney said his possession (or his agents is Russia) was a threat because the software could be used to manipulate the markets.

[wolfcreek]

http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/NewsDisplay.php?Entity=BlankfeinLC&Date=2009-06-26

http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/NewsDisplay.php?Entity=BlankfeinLC&Date=2009-07-01

A mass conspiracy, if you will. Organized crime, indeed.

[snuffy smiff]

may as well throw this into the mix:

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1364-America-Is-Running-Out-Of-Rope.html

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

"The fact of the matter is, we already had the collateral," Blankfein says. "If AIG had defaulted, guess what — we would have kept the collateral from AIG and from the banks we'd bought protection from. The government's decision to bail out AIG was about the risks to the system. It wasn't about Goldman Sachs."

What collateral from AIG? "Securitized" mortgages? And without the bailouts, it's not obvious that those "banks we'd bought protection from" would have paid off either.

[Brugmansian]

GS is trying to figure out how to pay huge bonuses this year without calling them bonuses. It knows its image is as low as it can go. Wonder what the payoff to Time was for running this defense.