[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.

[Gondring]

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.

Yup...very familiar...the economics of Mussolini's fascist regime...

"In actual fact, it is the State, i.e. the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise. As long as business was good, profit remained to private initiative. When the depression came, the Government added the loss to the tax-payer's burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

--Under the Axe of Fascism, by Gaetano Salvemini, p. 416 (1936).

Note that big business, not small business, got Mussolini's bailouts, too, such that bankers and investment houses made off with taxpayer money.

[silverleaf]

Maybe it’s easier to take high risks when you get private one-on-one counseling sessions with the Treasury Secretary who happens to be a former CEO who happens to have a heavy personal stake in the company’s success, along with every other $6000 suit-wearing stiff in his inner circle

Just sayin’.