http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/058315-2009-09-25-federal-reserve-spending-another-556-billion-in-mortgage-market.htm
Posted on 09/25/2009 9:25:39 PM PDT by STARWISE
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again
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The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson.
There's John Thain, the a**hole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company.
And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing.
There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board.
The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture:
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumercredit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts.
All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap.
Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased.
They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
Rest @ link
The Chicago Ouroboros: Obama, Ayers, Oughton, Dohrn, Minow, Taibbi, Koch, and DARK POOL TRADING
Excerpt:
6) Since 1965, Newton Minow has been a partner & senior counsel at Sidley-Austin.
7) Circa 1987/1988, Newton Minow's daughter, Martha, is instrumental [along with Ayers and Khalid Al-Mansour] in getting Barack Hussein Obama Jr admitted to Harvard Law School.
*snip*
9) In July of 2009, Matt Taibbi publishes a blistering exposé of Goldman Sachs.
10) Nell Minow, daughter of Newton and sister of Martha, is immediately dispatched to spearhead the campaign to destroy Matt Taibbi.
~~PING!
http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/058315-2009-09-25-federal-reserve-spending-another-556-billion-in-mortgage-market.htm
OK, so why not buy investments in them?
In capitalism there’s always a way to get a piece of the pie.
This may seem like a crazy question but...is it possible that these are the same entities that put our congressmen/women in compromising positions thereby controlling our taxpayer purse strings?
I’m amazed at the dysfunction in our Congress.
Every time I see Goldman Sachs I think of the GS exec who came to the Century Plaza Hotel to try out the new furnishings for the rooms remodel and left his ‘buttcrack print’ on the mohair ottoman. My husband remarked on how the team touring same room the next day reviewed the ‘problem’ of this particular fabric showing this a-hole’s buttcrack.
Sorry... Goldman Sachs = buttcrack to me.
Oh no! It was the poor folks, and the government, and the fed, and the CRA. (/s)
Wall Street is already putting its spin out now that the gov’t is about to re-regulate them. A few threads down from this one is a thread blaming everybody but the bankers.
parsy, who hopes conservatives don’t fall for the spin
BTTT
THere are 1300 plus private healthcare insurance companies. Putting them out of business via ‘public option’ and co-op ins. programs means that the capital ‘trapped’ in them will have to be reabsorbed into the US investment and banking system..FOLLOW THE MONEY. PIRATE RAID planned. Putting most private practice MDs out of practice by eliminating their only viable cash cow, is a necessary fallout. GOLDMAN SACHS has a big catchers’ mitt along with the Fed Reserves’ banking system, both of which would like to free up that capital in healthcare ins. companies.
Recently, Goldman Sachs discovered its proprietary high-frequency trading programs had been spirited to Germany. The stopped trading for a week...the volume on the NYSE is reported to have dropped 48%.
The public is not going to stand for the decimation of their doctors.
“The public is not going to stand for the decimation of their doctors.”
12 months ago I said America would never elect a man names “Hussein”.
That wasn’t a problem, Barack Obama appeared on the ballots sans Hussein.
The Democrats are starting to panic about Corzine now. There was evidence of this today, on KOS...
The Corruption is just to open. Hell these Democrats are dealing in HUMAN BODY PARTS, for chrissakes!!
And the Major Media has begun to cover. Watch for a LOT of “Look how GREAT Corzine is!” articles and TV News spots in the next few weeks.
Unknown to the public, the Medicare Part B, as part of the 1987 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Bill, phased in surgery subspecialty cuts of a draconian nature, not effective until Jan 1 1991. Some specialties had the base points and time points cut so severely that as much as a 65% reduction in service payment resulted that HAS REMAINED IN PLACE 18 years. The practices of surgical subspecialties has relied heavily on PRIVATE INS. to offset the heavy Medicare Part B reductions. THe break year was 1990/1991...it is never mentioned in any discussions of Medicare reimbursement changes...Payment schedules have had a ‘L’ shaped collapse since ‘91 with NO recovery and only threats of further reductions.
In addition, the Medicare B cuts took more money from MDs practices than was required for malpractice premiums. For most specialties, loaded heavily with Medicare B, return of the 1990 reimbursement rate erases the malpractice premium totally. This is never mentioned or documented per specialty in any articles. Return to the 1990 levels of reimbursement, and surgical specialties will love to see Medicare patients again, and their financial malpractice problem disappears.
“is it possible that these are the same entities that put our congressmen/women in compromising positions thereby controlling our taxpayer purse strings?”
I’ve been wondering who’s been putting the screws to congress critters. Seems Dems on the take are never investigated [the crooks buy them] and Repubs fall on their swords as indiscretions are revealed [marginally less corruptible, but have a sex drive which is used as leverage] Glad they are starting to take the heat but stay in office. To me, philandering is a personal issue. If the Mrs. wants to administer super glue justice, I’m ok with that!
Do you trust the Democrats to pass sane banking regulations?
No. They are likely to overdo it. That’s why GOP needs to get serious and quit all this libertarian do-nothing crap and help craft sensible regs. But at this juncture, even over-doing is preferable to doing nothing.
parsy, who thinks gov’t has a duty to regulate the financial markets
The same CRA that was going to be strictly enforced before any merger between banks, IBs, and insurance companies was allowed?
Crucial to the passing of this Act was an amendment made to the GLBA, stating that no merger may go ahead if any of the financial holding institutions, or affiliates thereof, received a "less than satisfactory [sic] rating at its most recent CRA exam", essentially meaning that any merger may only go ahead with the strict approval of the regulatory bodies responsible for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).[17] This was an issue of hot contention, and the Clinton Administration stressed that it "would veto any legislation that would scale back minority-lending requirements." [18]
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