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Message Subject How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won
Poster Handle Anonymous Coward
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Good information...but it's only part of what's going on. Here's an example:

[link to www.businessweek.com]

Goldman Sachs Pressed By Born for Derivatives DataJuly 01, 2010, 5:03 PM EDT

July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. refused a request from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to reveal how much it makes trading derivatives, saying the bank doesn’t separate the figure from other businesses.

“Some other firms have provided us with that data when we’ve asked for it and Goldman Sachs hasn’t,” Commissioner Brooksley Born said today in Washington on the second day of a hearing investigating the role of derivatives in the 2008 credit crisis, which sparked the worst recession since the 1930s. “It makes one wonder why Goldman has the incentive or impetus to not release this information.”

...Goldman Sachs, the most profitable Wall Street firm in history, is being questioned about credit-default swap trades with American International Group Inc., the insurer bailed out by the U.S. government after AIG was unable to meet collateral demands from trading partners on the contracts. The swaps, used by Goldman Sachs and other banks to hedge against declines in the value of mortgage-linked debt, caused losses at AIG as housing prices collapsed.

‘It’s Integrated’

...Goldman Sachs was subpoenaed by the commission last month after the New York-based firm sent more than a billion pages of documents to the panel, a shipment so sizable that panel members called it an attempt to hinder their probe.

“We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices and dump a bunch of rubbish,” Chairman Phil Angelides, who previously served as California’s treasurer, said June 7. “This has been a very deliberate effort over time to run out the clock.”


Born’s Warning

Born had warned in 1998, as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that the unregulated over-the- counter derivatives market posed a danger to the global financial system. She moved to address changes in how swaps based on interest rates, commodities or currencies were traded and was stopped by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who all argued the market could regulate itself.

Born said last year that the banks that caused the crisis were trying to stop the congressional overhaul of the market. ...
(see article)
 
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