Does Goldman Sachs Rule The World?

[Magdalen]

The article is 7 pages long. I hope most of you take the time to read it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine



The Great American Bubble Machine

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

MATT TAIBBI





By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson . . . Robert Rubin. . . John Thain, . . . Robert Steel. . . Joshua Bolten. . . and Mark Patterson, . . . . Ed Liddy. 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 . . .



<snip>



The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bankholding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

[Bird of Prey]

Oh Magdalen, it's just sooooooo depressing. Do I believe it?? So far, about seventy percent but I have to keep reading. . . .

[CACTUSWENDY]

On a smaller scale...the one that holds the purse strings holds the control. Might be why for so many years the man of the house controlled the household monies.

On the big scale of things....those that control the world purse strings holds the power and control of the whole world. It makes no difference what party you belong to. What faith/non-faith you adhere to has nothing to do with it. With the control of the money....I can command everything from wars to what you pay for a loaf of bread.

The old saying of follow the money is the key to it all. Always has been and it appears it always will.

It does make one feel very small in the scope of things.

<<<<wonders away.....humming...'It's a small world after all....it's a small world after all.....it's a small world after all....it's a small, small world.

[Don]

Damn it, Wendy. Get those voices out of my head.

You're spot on about everything but that stupid song, BTW. :)

[robeiae]

Let me help, Don.

Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INpR7GRzFNc).

[Bird of Prey]

Everybody wants to rule the world. . . .

Tears for Fears

[whistlelock]

Does goldman sachs rule the world?

No.

11 to 13 year old girls do. everything on the planet is built and designed to appeal to that demographic.

It's just that goldman sachs figured that out a while ago.

[bettielee]

Perhaps they only rule the Matrix?

[Magdalen]

LAUGH, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow it's mirth,
But has trouble enough of it's own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.


Excerpt from "Solitude" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I guess I should've made the Thread title a bit more humorous.

[WendyNYC]

This internal memo (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cartoonlounge/2009/07/goldman-sachs-internal-memo.html)made me chuckle.

[robeiae]

*gasp*

Is that REAL?!?!?

[WendyNYC]

Of course. All things you read are real.

[Don]

Yeah, and it's on the Interwebz, too, so that makes it twice as true.

[Bird of Prey]

Does goldman sachs rule the world?

No.

11 to 13 year old girls do. everything on the planet is built and designed to appeal to that demographic.

It's just that goldman sachs figured that out a while ago.

That's Saks Fifth Avenue: SKS.


Goldman Sachs is GS, in case you're putting money on it. . . .

[Magdalen]

Thanks for the Link, Wendy. I've been so busy popping in to authorscoop.com

(http://authorscoop.com/)

that I almost forgot to check in with The New Yorker. Good stuff!

[whistlelock]

That's Saks Fifth Avenue: SKS.


Goldman Sachs is GS, in case you're putting money on it. . . .oh....in that case, we're screwed.

[Bird of Prey]

oh....in that case, we're screwed.

Yes, apparently as GS really stands for get screwed. . . .And dear GS truly lives up to its moniker on the NYSE. . . .

[Magdalen]

Well, there's a bit of a difference, I think, between getting screwed and getting raped. Hint: one is consensual but unenjoyable, the other is a crime.

[Bird of Prey]

Well, there's a bit of a difference, I think, between getting screwed and getting raped. Hint: one is consensual but unenjoyable, the other is a crime.


So where are we on the GS scandal: rape or screwed?? I'm betting screwed because GS now has its own orbit around the sun and earth revolves around it.

[Magdalen]

From Page 4:

In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 11,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housingbased securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgagebacked securities — a third of which were subprime — much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.


. . .

AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.


Unsolicited, unwanted and distinctly unenjoyable sex: sounds like rape to me.

[Bird of Prey]

From Page 4:




Unsolicited, unwanted and distinctly unenjoyable sex: sounds like rape to me.


Yeah, Mag, but that's not what they're saying to the judge. We can only hope that Obama and his staff have the guts to call it what it is. . . .

[Shadow_Ferret]

I had to Google Goldman Sachs. I'd never heard of them. Obviously they can't be very effective in ruling the world if I never heard of them.

[Magdalen]

I had to Google Goldman Sachs. I'd never heard of them. Obviously they can't be very effective in ruling the world if I never heard of them.

Glad you were able to ferret out that bit of info!

I sit astride Parnassus with my lyre,* (see def. #2A)
And pick with care the disobedient wire.
That stupid shepherd lolling on his crook
With deaf attention scarcely deigns to look.
I bide my time, and it shall come at length,
When, with a Titan's energy and strength,
I'll grab a fistful of the strings, and O,
The word shall suffer when I let them go! --Farquharson Harris”




* FIDICULA — 1. Small lyre,a musical instrument [lyra].2 The name has also been given, by analogy, to the constellation Lyra.3

2. An instrument of torture. In this sense, the word is always used in the plural.4 It has not yet been possible to determine exactly to what kind of device it applies: some have made it derive from findere and have supposed that it applied to hooks with which the flesh of the subject was lacerated; if so, it would be completely synonymous with ungulae.5 But this hypothesis is untenable;6 its main shortcoming is that it disagrees entirely with the primary meaning of the word, which is well established by the texts. Generally speaking, fidiculae are cited among instruments of torture next to the rack [equuleus]. It must, until further notice, be considered likely that it was an assembly of ropes, which, by their arrangement, were more or less reminiscent of the lyre (fides, fidium). The torturer would stretch them (fidiculas tendere) by means of ratchet wheels or pins, after having attached the end of them to the subject's limbs, in such a way as to pull his bones apart and dislocate his joints.7 He loosened the ropes in the opposite direction (fidiculas laxabat),8 when it was deemed appropriate to put an end to the torture. But were the fidiculae necessarily part of the rack, or were they distinct, it being possible, however, to add them to it? Here again opinions are divided. Quintilian uses in the same sentence the two expressions equuleos movere and fidiculas tendere, so that he seems to be speaking of two different kinds of torture.9 But the arguments that can be adduced are, in the absence of figurative representations, altogether insufficient to decide the matter.

Fidiculae were usually among the devices used to torture slaves.

[William Haskins]

President Obama (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per) said Friday he would nominate Robert Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/goldman_sachs_group_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org) International, to a top economic position at the State Department. Mr. Hormats, 66, will be under secretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs. He was deputy trade representative from 1979 through 1981 and held other posts at the State Department throughout his career. Hillary Rodham Clinton (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/hillary_rodham_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the secretary of state, said in a speech on Wednesday that she hoped to make economic policy and trade a larger part of United States diplomacy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/business/18bizbriefs-GOLDMANEXECU_BRF.html?_r=2&scp=4&sq=obama&st=cse

[brokenfingers]

I had to Google Goldman Sachs. I'd never heard of them. Obviously they can't be very effective in ruling the world if I never heard of them.Au contraire. That makes them very effective. They're the power behind the scenes.