Today’s Senate hearings, carried on CNBC, Bloomberg, and C-SPAN, represent the first major exposure of the American people to the scandalous frauds of the derivatives casino, including synthetic collateralized debt obligations (synthetic CDOs or CDO²). These are things most people have heard very little about. They begin to open up the shocking reality behind such shopworn euphemisms like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and “troubled assets.” Reactionaries in general and Republicans in particular have done everything possible to hide the role of derivatives, which must be considered the main cause of the financial panic of September 2008 which brought down Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG, after felling Bear Stearns in March of the same year. The reactionary legend, repeated yesterday on the Senate floor by financier minion GOP Sen. Gregg of New Hampshire, is that the crisis was caused by poor people taking out subprime mortgages and then defaulting, bringing down the entire Anglo-American banking system and triggering the bailouts. Either that, or too much government spending was too blame.
Washington – A key Goldman Sachs trading manager indicated in his personnel performance review that he could use the “fear” in the market of a coming collapse in the nation’s mortgage market to make profits for the Wall Street firm, documents released Tuesday show.
Allegations of fraud brought last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission is a shocking departure from the culture of collusion among the U.S. government and the nation’s top banks. That despite the position of this publication and myriad others broadly categorized as “fringe” who have consistently and vociferously objected to the two or more standards applied to organizations and individuals by a corrupt legal system.
The beleaguered Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs boasted that it was making tens of millions of dollars of profits daily by betting against its own clients’ investments, according to internal emails released yesterday by a US senator.
While the SEC is busy investigating Goldman Sachs, it might want to look into another Goldman-dominated fraud: computerized front running using high-frequency trading programs.
Market commentators are fond of talking about “free market capitalism,” but according to Wall Street commentator Max Keiser, it is no more. It has morphed into what his TV co-host Stacy Herbert calls “rigged market capitalism”: all markets today are subject to manipulation for private gain.
“The trillions in ill-gotten wealth of Wall Street operators must be re-appropriated and used to help fund public works programs to provide jobs for the unemployed and rebuild the social infrastructure. This money, stolen from the American people, must be used as well to provide relief for the millions victimized by the financial robber barons”.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil case Friday against giant investment bank Goldman Sachs charging “fraudulent misconduct” in relation to $1 billion of worthless sub-prime mortgage securities Goldman palmed off to its clients in 2007.
Where was the European Central Bank while all of this was happening? Has the ECB become dangerously enraptured with the new Wall Street and its “techniques”?
At 9:30pm on Sunday, September 21, 2008, Goldman Sachs was saved from imminent collapse by the announcement that the Federal Reserve would allow it to become a bank holding company – implying unfettered access to borrowing from the Fed and other forms of implicit government support, all of which subsequently proved most beneficial. Officials allowed Goldman to make such an unprecedented conversion in the name of global financial stability. (The blow-by-blow account is in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail; this is confirmed in all substantial detail by Hank Paulson’s memoir.) Read the rest of this entry »
We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Geithner/Summers/Rubin). Left strewn on the battleground could be your pension fund and 401K.
In These New Times 