Vampire squid or Goldman trader?
Up and down Wall Street, analysts and traders are buzzing that Goldman, which only recently paid back its government bailout money, will report blowout profits from trading on Tuesday.
Analysts predict the bank earned more than $2 billion in the March-June period, thanks to its trading prowess across world markets. If they are right, the bank’s rivals will once again be left to wonder exactly how Goldman, long the envy of Wall Street, could have rebounded so dramatically only months after the nation’s financial industry was shaken to its foundations.
[….]
Startling, too, is how much of its profits Goldman is expected to share with its employees. Analysts estimate that the bank will set aside enough money to pay a total of $18 billion in compensation and benefits this year to its 28,000 employees, or more than $600,000 per employee. Top producers stand to earn millions.
Gee, I wonder how they did it? It wouldn’t have anything to do with that “secret, rapid-fire, stock- and commodities-trading software” that former employee Sergey Aleynikov was arrested for stealing, would it?
It wasn’t just Goldman that faced imminent harm if Aleynikov were to be released, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti told a federal magistrate judge at his July 4 bail hearing in New York. The 34-year-old prosecutor also dropped this bombshell: “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”
How do we know Goldman-Sachs hasn’t been using the program for just that purpose? Because Goldman employees Barack Obama and Tim Geither say so? Sorry, I’m not buying it.
Goldman’s massive profits probably didn’t have anything to do with the taxpayer money they got to use interest free for months either–or the billions they extracted from AIG, causing
the firm’s collapse, and the ensuing financial catastrophe that to this day has been propped up only thanks to the US government’s backstop of nearly $10 trillion in various worthless assets.
causing the that giant corporation to collapse
This is an interesting blog post on Goldman’s involvement in the Sirius bankruptcy and the merger of Sirius and XM that I don’t completely comprehend, but this part that refers to the Goldman “doomsday” software (referred to above) makes a lot of sense to me.
They say something is only illegal if you get caught, In Goldman Sachs case, it’s not illegal to front-run markets or securities because their is no government nor law enforcement agency more powerful than Goldman Sachs itself. They are above being caught. They are above prosecution. Goldman Sachs is the government. President Obama is the perfect puppet through no fault of his own. His inexperience provides the strings. The dollars Goldman Sachs provide in campaign contributions decide the future of every individual American. You can’t beat city hall, and you can’t beat Goldman Sachs. In the end, it’’s just that simple. Arrests such as Bernie Madoff are authorized only when the public is looking for a scapegoat. America has been robbed again, and a 70 year old scam artist that the government has known about for decades has taken the fall for all of the stock market criminals.
I have no doubt that as soon as Goldman Sachs figures out a way to get its proprietary stock manipulation program to work with the uptick rule reinstated, that the rule will again be put back into effect for the Government’s ability to promote itself as a watchdog of investor confidence. Of course, John Q. Public will have no knowledge of this. Will Sirius XM stock begin to trade on its merits at that time? I doubt it. Unless of course Goldman Sachs decides that such a move would be profitable to its bottom line. Eventually retail investors will become frustrated, sell their SIRI shares to the likes of Goldman Sachs for pennies on the dollar, only to buy them back for much more in years to come.
It’s no wonder The New York Times quotes a competitor as calling Goldman Sach’s traders “Orcs.” And then there’s Matt Taibbi’s even more colorful description of the powerful investment bank:
“a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Reuters suggests that Goldman’s “profit bonanza could stoke anger.”
Ya think?
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