Why Goldmansachs is being hung out to dry

Yeah, it is just a bunch of bullshit, to keep people calm because they all know chaos is nearly here.

Could be. BAsically the elites don't want the peoples of the world to get upset. So they're giving them a bone now.

folks have to know by now they're being used big time by the elites. The corrupt wars , the finacial servitude put on them.

Could you upload that GLPVideo as utube is not readily available here

Sounds close.

on a side note, the Titanic was one of a fleet of ships owned by the White Star Line, an international shipping company owned by the Rockefeller family.

go figure

"Why Goldmansachs is being hung out to dry"

Others will follow.

I hardly ever watch TV anymore...

... But I was bored yesterday and watched the Goldman Sachs' congressional hearing.

I know that politics is nothing more than a professional wrestling show. But I was still compelled by this bread and circus act.

With that said, time will always tell what the real agenda is here... there's a lot of manufactured "get rid of the fed" nonsense going on... it makes you wonder if this is what these "hearings" are all about.

The whole carbon tax/VAT tax stuff is obviously going to invade our daily lives... it seems this is all tied together.

It's interesting to see how little talk there is here at GodLikeProductions about yesterday's hearing (with stunning revelations included that Goldman Sachs played both sides of the game). Interesting that either people are waking up to the cons of life or have been scientifically engineered not to care (apathy).

One last point. Goldman Sachs has been centrally involved in just about every financial collapse in history (so it is alleged).

I thought it was because of massive corruption and Fraud.

Over the years I have seen many of your post's. You always seem two steps ahead of what is going on. Bravo! I believe you are right on the mark on this one also. Nice going OP...

======================================================

I totally agree that we (the sheeple) are being handed a bone so to speak. we were so outraged to GS that we wanted blood. Now we got it.

The next thing to come to mind is ,,,,

What is really going on with the fed?

It is. And the SEC are complicit in it.

[link to cromalternativemoney.org]

Agree

That's why right after the SEC filed, the UK and Germany Immediately followed! Yet they aren't going after any of the people at lehman, or AIG or JPM, even though the whole system is corrupt

They have to implode the current financial system and GS is like the main artery of worldwide financial corruption.

What really needs to be done is drive a stake through the heart.

Thanks appreciate that.

So here is another one.

What really happened in regards to the South Korean naval vessel sinking?
Was it an attempt to start a war in the far east?
Was it a foreign sub, loaded with a Nth Korean type torpedo?
Was it a rogue(compromised) Nth K operative working for a foreign power?

Who is they? The 13, the 300, Hidden hand banksters, or you are hoping there are honest politicians?

FU&FW

[link to www.telegraph.co.uk]

Goldman Sachs: the bank that thought it ruled the world
Goldman Sachs was ‘doing God's work' - but it is now being investigated for fraud. Harry Wilson reports.


Published: 8:43AM BST 19 Apr 2010

Comments 31 | Comment on this article
Traders at the New York Stock Exchange
Finance sector stocks tumbled after Goldman Sachs was accused of fraud Photo: EPA

'Long-term greedy” was the phrase that Sidney Weinberg, Goldman Sachs’s legendary managing partner from the 1930s to the 1960s, used to describe the American investment bank’s overarching strategy. Such a pious mission statement from a corporate titan would make a modern audience balk. However the phrase neatly encapsulates the way that Goldman Sachs has operated over the past 80 years, a period in which it has risen from being a little-known, slightly scrubby broker to the world’s most profitable, powerful and controversial financial institution.

When Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s current chairman and chief executive, was caught saying last year that the bank was doing “God’s work”, the contrast between Goldman Sachs’s own view of its business and what the rest of the world thought of it was vividly demonstrated.

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His comments came just weeks after the firm was memorably described in an article in Rolling Stone magazine as a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. Doing God’s work is the last thing most think Goldman Sachs is up to.

As Philip Pullman writes in his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, “As soon as men who believe they’re doing God’s will get hold of power, whether it’s a household or a village or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them.”

Last Friday, those who believed that the devil was running the show at Goldman Sachs finally received the news they had been waiting for. America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that it was investigating the bank for misleading investors in so-called collateralised debt obligations, a complex financial product sold by the bank during the boom years of the Noughties.

Goldman Sachs immediately hit back, saying that it would “vigorously” contest the case. However some will have found it hard to hide a feeling of Schadenfreude that at last a bank that at its peak was worth more than $100 billion (£65 billion) was finally being brought to heel.

The story of the bank over the past decade has been one of inexorable rise. In the 1980s Salomon Brothers, now part of the American banking behemoth Citigroup, was the bank to beat on the global stage. In the 1990s a cluster of largely American firms vied for supremacy after the demise of Salomon’s, brought down in part by being found guilty of rigging bond market auctions. The 2000s, however, undoubtedly belonged to Goldman Sachs.

In whichever market observers cared to look at, whether it be share trading, bond trading, corporate advisory or securities underwriting, Goldman Sachs was either at the top or running a close second. Its success was born of a combination of brutally hard work, an undoubted ability to attract the best young minds and that undefinable X-factor that comes from being acknowledged as the best game in town.

“No one ever got fired for hiring Goldman Sachs” is still one of the markets’ mantras. Indeed it has been said that the bank was often hired by companies to advise them only because they were afraid that it might end up working for a rival.

For all its reputation, there has always been at least a hint that some of Goldman Sachs’s success had less to do with its market nous and more to do with its connections. After Lehman Brothers was allowed to file for bankruptcy in September 2008, Goldman Sachs, along with Morgan Stanley, was allowed to convert itself into a bank holding company just weeks later. This gave it access to tens of billions of dollars of government lending. One did not need to be a conspiracy theorist to point out that US Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson – the man in charge of the bail-out – was the bank’s former chief executive.

This impression was not helped when Mr Paulson selected Neel Kashkari, a youthful former Goldman Sachs executive, to run the American government’s Troubled Asset Relief Programme, the equivalent of Britain’s Asset Protection Scheme. The move put him in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money. Again, Goldman Sachs was a beneficiary.

The American authorities’ case against Goldman Sachs prominently features another young Goldman Sachs banker, a French-born 31-year-old called Fabrice Tourre. Mr Tourre, who referred to himself in emails published by the SEC as “the fabulous Fab”, is alleged to have sold a debt product that he knew would fail to a group of investors, mainly large banks, including ABN Amro, now part of Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mr Tourre is alleged to have allowed another Goldman Sachs client, American hedge fund Paulson & Co, to select the complex bonds that were put inside the product. The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs did this so that Paulson & Co could make money by betting that the bonds would fall in value (Paulson & Co has not been accused of any wrongdoing).

Goldman Sachs’s strong links with hedge funds have always aroused suspicion; however, the bank has argued that it has highly effective internal “Chinese walls”, barriers that stop employees from sharing information that might allow them or a client to trade on insider information.

The significance of the latest allegations is twofold. First, they suggest that Goldman Sachs was favouring one client over another. This is particularly resonant as Paulson & Co was one of the most high-profile success stories of the financial crisis and recently the subject of a best-selling book, The Greatest Trade Ever. The book detailed how Paulson & Co founder John Paulson made billions of dollars shorting the American sub-prime market.

Second, the allegations imply that Goldman Sachs made money from the travails of its own customers. It is often pointed out that the bank makes far more money from trading with its own money than it does from advising its clients. This so-called proprietary trading involves the firm putting billions of dollars of its own capital at risk by buying stakes in assets as diverse as golf courses – the firm was once the largest owner of golf courses in Japan – to oil and ships.

In the case of the sub-prime market, it is now well-known that Goldman Sachs, unlike almost all of its Wall Street rivals, took an early decision around 2006 to begin betting against the American housing market.

The SEC’s allegations suggest that these trades might have involved not just canny positioning by the bank, but actively putting its clients into trades that it knew would lose them money.

What this means for the future of Goldman Sachs is still too early to say. At best, the bank will be one of many financial institutions that become embroiled in a series of investigations relating to this issue – Britain’s own Financial Services Authority is already reported to be starting its own investigation into the matter. Finding safety in numbers would allow Goldman Sachs to argue that it was just doing what everyone else was.

It would be more serious, however, if the SEC’s investigation remained an isolated incident. If this was the case it could mark the beginning of the end for Goldman Sachs, going the same way as other investment banks that sailed too close to the wind and sank. Who now, aside from those with a long memory and an interest in markets, remembers Salomon Brothers or Drexel Burnham Lambert?

As one Goldman Sachs partner, quoted in Charles Ellis’s history of the bank The Partnership, said: “Only looking back could we see the real risk – the risk of arrogance. We didn’t see it then, but it was there and it was growing.

“The firm was at the top. We had always been the best – always the top students and the best athletes and the class leaders. And now we were the best firm – in our self-appraisal. But that was the first step towards arrogance.”

*

video of sachs hearing

[link to www.abc.net.au]

In the Goldman Sachs case, government regulations and regulators failed to prevent what they now claim is civil fraud. If economic regulations and government regulators can’t prevent such things from happening, especially in one of the largest financial companies in the world, then what good are they? Isn’t that the purported purpose of regulations and regulators?

The feds aren’t going after Goldman Sachs on criminal charges of fraud, which would fall within the proper governmental powers. Instead, they’re only going after the company on civil charges of fraud. They’re seeking money, not jail time.

If investors have been defrauded, why can’t they sue for their damages? Why shouldn’t they, not the government, receive the money for damages they’ve allegedly suffered? What business does the government have suing for civil damages? It hasn’t suffered any injury it helped cause it by not regulating like they should have. The U.S. government needs to be sued also not sueing.

It’s all about money. As the deficit becomes larger and larger, we can expect to see the federal government desperately looking for more ways to extract money from private businesses. Look at the record fine they just levied against Toyota — $16.4 billion, an amount that Toyota has agreed to pay rather than incur expensive litigation.





[link to www.prisonplanet.com]

Tuesday' G$ Senate hearing couldn't have made it any plainer.

puts & calls

long vs short

it's called making book (derivatives)

you know, just like the boys making odds on the ponies

which is called gambling

only GS refers to it as "dealing with liquidity issues", i.e., raising capital

If it's all just a crap shoot, then yeah, there will be winners and losers, except for the bankster bookies.

OP, w/all due respect, if this is what constitutes raising capital in today' world, then we are beyond fucked, no matter the immediate agenda in all of the current G$ melodrama.

The treasury is the one to watch. There were rumors on Businessinsder today that might go down.

[link to www.businessinsider.com]

[link to www.bloomberg.com]

Also, this certainly takes the heat off JPM who compared to GS are much larger. And they're involved in just as many if not more crooked deals.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. share price: 43.46 Market cap: 172.77B

Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. share price: 157.01 Market cap: 82.72B

Neither of them should have bank holding status and JPM should be broken up too but they're not getting any heat from the media or from the public.

the revolution has occured it was not televised. Welcome to a new world we only dreamed of. Now if we can just get the rainbow gatherings going again...

So, boss daddy JPM gets passed the ball

My, I would love to go back to one of those...........my kind of people

The NWO is transferring power from the old circles to it's final form - with the old circles being ritually sacrificed, The Catholic Church, Bankers, Political establishment, Jews, Muslims - all set to burn!

Winnner Winner Chicken Dinner

Titanic sinking was an inside job. Captain Edward John Smith did not go down with the ship but escaped on the single lifeboat held in reserve for the perps. He was rewarded handsomely and lived out his life in total obscurity, though with all his needs met.

[link to www.youtube.com]

FU&FW

[link to solari.com]


Goldman Whac-A-Mole
Catherine and News & Commentary,
April 28, 2010 at 2:04 pm

It makes sense to pause in the outpouring of news about Goldman Sachs to ponder what has happened and the nature of the game that is afoot.

Goldman is the visible target in a game of economic warfare. Who is on the other side is not clear. For want of a better term, let’s call the other party “Mr. Global.”

Mr. Global has arranged for Goldman to be “swarmed” - attacked or threatened with attack by multiple parties, including government agencies, the media and private players, including competitors. Presumably, Mr. Global has serious private and governmental intelligence capabilities and resources. However, Goldman Sachs does too.

We watched the Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein yesterday confirm in testimony on the record that reform was needed, which included passing the financial services reform bill put forward in the Senate by Senator Dodd. We can presume that Mr. Global has made it clear to Goldman that unless they get on board with promoting the bill that things will not go well for them.

So Goldman came to heel in a big way. They sat down, thumped their tail on the floor and licked the hand that feeds them. And they did it in the most public way as all the financial markets watched. Their stock is up this morning. They bought some breathing space. How much is not yet clear.

What could make Goldman sit down and obey? Was it the lawsuit from the SEC? Perhaps. We think it is more than that. Let’s look at where the real terror struck.

First, we have a Goldman director resign over an investigation related to insider trading. What’s the media message? Goldman Sachs directors engage in insider trading.

Then, we have the SEC file a civil fraud complaint against Goldman. What’s the media message? Goldman risks losing insider status. Goldman sc**ws their clients. Goldman’s stock is losing you money. Shareholders lose money. Bondholders could too. If you do business with Goldman Sachs, that could lose you money too. You might go on Mr. Global’s hit list now if you support one of his targets instead of benefiting from inside information by doing business with a player in Mr. Global’s good graces. Note also that the stock options of board and management drop in value. Maybe working at Goldman is not such a good deal. If you are a young officer and push for fees, will they protect you? Look at what is happening to the young VP who got named in the lawsuit.

Then, it comes out that Goldman got a Wells Notice in the summer of 2009 from the SEC regarding the allegations in the fraud suit and never disclosed that in their SEC filings. Very significant tactical error on Goldman’s part, by the way.

Meantime, we have investigations or the threats of the same announced by other sovereign governments and state Attorney Generals. The German State bank severs ties. This is generally called “pile on” and indicates that Mr. Global’s reach is global at the highest levels.

And then, it just happens to come out in the media that there are questions about whether the Board knew about the Wells notice. You see, if they did not, then they are not competent. They are not watching the store. If they did, well, then they are hiding things that shareholders should have known.

And then, last Friday, two shareholders bring lawsuits against the CEO and the Board of Directors.

And then, it comes out that between the time that Goldman got the Wells notice and before the time that the SEC brought suit and the stock dropped a whole lot, members of the Board of Directors sold millions of dollars of stock.

And to make things even better, the Senate dumps out tons of e-mails related to the lawsuit that are full of juicy quotes. Since the Senate is also doing an investigation, they are free to lobby the media in support of the SEC’s side of the lawsuit. This is a nice pincer movement.

Sullivan & Cromwell has its hands full. Subpoena discovery to the SEC, to the Senate, to the UK and other foreign government investigators, now to private parties. And some are leaking to the press. If there is one difference in the subpoena compliance to different parties, there could be questions about obstruction of justice. This could get pretty complicated. Enough of it, particularly if discovery shifts into current events, and you can wreck havoc with electronic e-mail systems.

Do you see a story emerging here?

Now the Board has a reason to get nervous. It is not just the company that is a target. Board members are targets. Sullivan & Cromwell, Goldman’s lead counsel, is representing Goldman. Are they deemed to represent the members of the board as well? Have individual board members decided that they need their own counsel individually or collectively? What happens to them if the company fails? If the swarm continues, driving up their cost of capital, causing a loss of clients and revenues, who knows what could happen.

Not everyone on the Board is as rich as the senior management. Goldman Sachs may have a lot of resources. The individual Board members cannot be assured that Goldman Sachs will stand behind them, particularly if their interests are not aligned with senior management, or if the company goes down.

Mr. Global has laid down the tracks to put space between the board members and management and the largest shareholders. Non-alignments within your leadership group are a dangerous thing to manage when you are in the middle of a food fight with Mr. Global.

Which brings us to wonder who is Goldman’s errors & omissions (E&O) insurer.

The Board of Directors looks to the E&O insurer to pay for their legal defense in the event of lawsuits. However, an E&O insurer can claim that they don’t have to fund a defense if there is fraud involved. And indeed, fraud as a legal matter may not be involved. However, Mr. Global’s arranging for a governmental agency to claim that fraud is involved may be enough to derail the funding of a defense by the E&O insurer.

Who is the E&O insurer the Board is depending upon? Are they funding counsel and does that include counsel other than Sullivan & Cromwell? These are more questions worth asking.

Beyond legal defense, the intimation from Mr. Global is that now the media may turn to explore Board members’ dirty laundry - whether the policies involving their work and career, where their profits come from or their personal problems and mistakes. We all have them.

For example, perhaps the media would be interested in how Jim Johnson got the housing bubble going as Chairman of Fannie Mae and how that relates to Goldman’s profits in the mortgage markets. How about a discussion of Ruth Brown’s magnificent job of deflecting criticism about the sources of funds in Brown University’s endowment? Indeed, it was Brown University that made money on prison stocks that were the beneficiaries of the drug raids that accompanied the subprime mortgage frauds that Fannie Mae and Goldman Sachs financed. (See “Brown University - Cashing Out on Cornell Corrections” here)

Given what we have seen so far, it is a fair to say that Mr. Global’s intelligence capacity includes a “control file” on each member of management and the Board. Which means this Board is not in a position to or has the constitution for a real fight.

So, we had quite a show yesterday in Senate Testimony with the CEO kissing the ring, supporting the reform bill and showing no offense at the hypocrisy of Congress. (Among other things, Lloyd Blankfein deserves more than a little recognition for keeping a straight face when it was suggested that Goldman aspire to the ethical standards of Jackson Stephens of Stephens, Inc. of Arkansas.)

If the reform bill is adopted into law as proposed, it will make the Federal Reserve much more powerful. Goldman Sachs is a member (and presumably shareholder) of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most powerful bank in the system. The New York Fed serves as depository for the U.S. government and as agent for the Exchange Stabilization Fund, the mother of all slush funds. Mr. Global apparently wants to make sure a more powerful Fed does not have to contend with a more arrogant Goldman Sachs. As the Fed accumulates even more power, are the forces in control at the Fed shifting?

America is learning quite a lot from watching the show. More on that later.

Round One is over. Let’s see what emerges in Round Two.