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The People vs. Goldman Sachs... the Justice Department should bring criminal charges
Rolling Stone ^ | 5/11/11 | Matt Taibbi

Posted on 05/12/2011 2:08:24 PM PDT by dead

click here to read article


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1 posted on 05/12/2011 2:08:27 PM PDT by dead
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To: dead
"They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of"

Sounds like everyone who has served in Congress for the last 80 years should be in jail too.

2 posted on 05/12/2011 2:10:42 PM PDT by hometoroost (Love the Onion story on a closed-ceremony "transparency" award. Oh wait, that actually happened.)
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To: dead

Did anyone read all of this? I don’t have time. Bottom line please and thank you.


3 posted on 05/12/2011 2:11:26 PM PDT by Linda Frances
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To: dead

The Justice Department should prefer charges???

Whoever wrote that must have forgotten who is in charge of the Justice Department.

Eric Holder is incompetent ,racist, and totally under the control of Barrack Obama.

There will be no charges.


4 posted on 05/12/2011 2:12:36 PM PDT by Venturer
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To: hometoroost; dead; All

In 2008 after they learned that the top 3 GS executives all had salaries over $65 million, 43% of stockholders voted in favor of an Advisory Vote on Executive Compensation. The next year the CEO salary was a mere $25 million. This year I have not been able to find that information. Forbes CEO Compensation is a good site to Google.


5 posted on 05/12/2011 2:15:24 PM PDT by gleeaikin
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To: dead

All of the top officers of this company from today going back thirty years should rot hanging on street signs on wall street, along with the trash at WIG.


6 posted on 05/12/2011 2:22:56 PM PDT by org.whodat
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To: Linda Frances

I read some of it. Most of it is just general criticism by somebody who doesn’t understand Goldman’s business in any depth. The Levin hearings were ridiculous, and simply showed that the SEC either didn’t understand what Goldman was doing in its dealings with hedge fund managers, or more likely the SEC targeted Goldman for some other reason. I know what Goldman was doing and they did nothing unethical or illegal in the business that they testified about to Levin. Rolling Stone magazine is not a source for useful information about business and economics.


7 posted on 05/12/2011 2:23:06 PM PDT by socialism_stinX (Why did California go bankrupt?...because of unfunded mandates, medicaid, and illegal immigration.)
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To: dead

(one which it helped create, incidentally)

Goldman Sachs IS one of the (global) handlers who put Obama into power and cashed in complements of the US taxpayer. They are as sinister as they come.

But as we have said multiple times on FR they are NOT dumb. Only those who fall for their avarice.

We are NOT simply dealing with a babbling narcissistic President. You can refute "conspiracies" or not, but you best know what it means.

Johnny Suntrade

8 posted on 05/12/2011 2:27:58 PM PDT by jnsun (The Left: the need to manipulate others because of nothing productive to offer.)
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To: socialism_stinX

Well, they are are bunch of sharpies. But everyone knows that, and does business with them anyway.


9 posted on 05/12/2011 2:28:56 PM PDT by proxy_user
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To: dead

in cahoots with a government that set up a system that allowed the kind of stuff I THINK they are talking about here....


10 posted on 05/12/2011 2:31:30 PM PDT by goodnesswins (Unlike the West, the Islamic world is serious.)
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To: org.whodat
All of the top officers of this company from today going back thirty years should rot hanging on street signs on wall street, along with the trash at WIG.

They should hang from the street signs after having been drawn and quartered.

11 posted on 05/12/2011 2:46:22 PM PDT by mas cerveza por favor
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To: dead
Excellent article from Rolling Stone.

Yes, Goldman knew exactly what they were doing.

What's baffling is that almost nobody knew the mortgage market would collapse. Blinded by greed I guess.

12 posted on 05/12/2011 3:09:34 PM PDT by Mariner (War Criminal #18)
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To: socialism_stinX
read some of it. Most of it is just general criticism by somebody who doesn’t understand Goldman’s business in any depth. The Levin hearings were ridiculous, and simply showed that the SEC either didn’t understand what Goldman was doing in its dealings with hedge fund managers, or more likely the SEC targeted Goldman for some other reason. I know what Goldman was doing and they did nothing unethical or illegal in the business that they testified about to Levin. Rolling Stone magazine is not a source for useful information about business and economics.

Well, that is one heck of a statement. With one paragraph you blow off an entire Senate investigation and a very lengthy, informative article from Rolling Stone. If you would like to refute the author point by point, feel free. Otherwise I'll just assume the author, Senator Levine and Senator Coburn know a little more than an anonymous poster on the internet.

13 posted on 05/12/2011 3:40:16 PM PDT by ScreamingFist (Quiet the Idiot)
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To: Venturer

Exacto. Goldman IS Obama admin— see, Geithner. For Bush , see Paulson and TARP. All of us taxpayers are expected to pony up to the losers at the table- and remove all their losses and risks. Absolute assholes.


14 posted on 05/12/2011 3:45:37 PM PDT by John S Mosby (Sic Semper Tyrannis)
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To: dead

Whew, that is a long one.
But then, I’m just here to see the posted reactions of the jerkoffs in the “buy one get two free” suits driving secondhand BMWs that were discarded from Goldman Sachs boardroom table anyway.


15 posted on 05/12/2011 3:46:38 PM PDT by nkycincinnatikid
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To: Linda Frances
Tiabbi is long winded and wrong again. He hates Wall St. Everyone knew the bubble would burst - it was just a matter of when. Like many others, Goldman guessed early and was right. Big deal. Wall St. can bet both directions; it's called hedging; something apparently Matt cannot grasp.

The problem is government, not Wall St.

Clinton mandated and created sub-prime mortgages through Fannie/HUD/CRA. Remove sub-prime mortgages, there would have been no sub-prime securities derivative bubble. Pretty simple.

16 posted on 05/12/2011 4:06:31 PM PDT by T. Jefferson (Batton down the hatches, full speed in reverse)
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To: dead

Taibbi should get an award for his reporting on the financial collapse.

He won’t because he is one of the only reporters (and he’s a lefty himself) that correctly lays most of the blame at the feet of the Clinton operatives who passed the relevant laws. And he’s gone after Obama for bringing many of these same losers back for round 2, and for taking boatloads of campaign cash for them.


17 posted on 05/12/2011 4:07:19 PM PDT by Daisyjane69 (Michael Reagan: "Welcome back, Dad, even if you're wearing a dress and bearing children this time)
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To: Linda Frances

save


18 posted on 05/12/2011 4:23:28 PM PDT by Rumplemeyer
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To: ScreamingFist

“Otherwise I’ll just assume the author, Senator Levine and Senator Coburn know a little more than an anonymous poster on the internet.”

They don’t. This is mainly grandstanding for political gain. I watched the Levin hearings live when the Goldman guys testified and in my view Levin had no clue what he was talking about half the time. I haven’t listened to Sen Coburn on this issue so I can’t comment on what he said. I’m a financial professional and I work with this kind of material every day, and it was clear to me that Sen. Levin didn’t understand what Goldman was doing in their synthetic CDO deal. There’s some good material about CDOs over at Wikipedia that explains what they are and can help readers understand what Goldman was doing and why it was not unethical.

Another thing I noticed constantly in the Levin hearings was that Levin was looking back at history, which is now a certainty, and assuming that Goldman knew everything we know now at the time Goldman made it’s decisions to get out of mortgage-backed securities. That’s just not what it was like at that time. Nobody knew for sure that the mortgage-backed securities market was going to implode. There were many smart fund managers who still wanted to buy those MBS. Goldman made a decision based on the information they had and their judgment, but as it always is in the markets in real time, Goldman didn’t know for sure which way the market would go and they could have been wrong when they sold MBS and hedged their long positions with short positions. Levin kept making the assumption that somehow Goldman Sachs could predict the future with great accuracy at that time a few years ago. I found that to be really dumb and annoying the way Levin kept repeating that implicit assumption in his statements.


19 posted on 05/12/2011 5:01:04 PM PDT by socialism_stinX (Why did California go bankrupt?...because of unfunded mandates, medicaid, and illegal immigration.)
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To: socialism_stinX

Nothing unethical, that’s BC in relation to GS. When you sell something with no intrinsic worth it is anything you want to call it. I call it crap.


20 posted on 05/12/2011 5:04:01 PM PDT by A Strict Constructionist (Oligarchy...never vote for the Ivy League candidate.)
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