Thieves, thieves, tramps and thrives!

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The United States must come to the conclusion that the international monetary financier system is finished.

Unsustainable usury and speculation in every financial transaction, fostering irrational, unreasonable, unconditional, unlimited financial support from the Fed, guaranteed by the faith and produce of the United States, means that the system can not be fixed, regulated, resuscitated, bailed-out, etc. There is simply not enough money that can be created to satisfy the usury, created from fantastical financial products and maneuvers.

All fact-less rhetoric, verbiage, articles, causes, distractions, etc are compounding the destruction to the population's physical economy.

Statecraft demands the termination of the monetary system: put the Fed into bankruptcy protection, recover the bailout trillions, banks that qualify will join the U.S. National Bank under Glass-Steagall standards. Credits and currency will be issued into the population's economy with the executive of creating, improving, and expanding the necessary facilities that enhance our standard of living.

We have never appreciated the accomplishments of this great nation; we are about to lose it all.

Congress must drop the petty passions that foster derision of government and treason; must discover priorities in the order and defense of the nation.

The United States is the Only Cause that will serve humanity; any other cause, issue, agenda, reorientation, etc. is treason.

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God I'm tired of this shit!

We began the year with the Clintonian and Reaganesta economic toy soldiers who, in the past had spoken of different field instructions, more cautious in fact, about the economy, but once anointed by the new commander-in-chief went forward and continued the economic policies of Little Boy Bush by instructing the Federal Reserve’s Field General, Bennie-The Beard-Bernanke, to load up the wheelbarrows of cash and dump them into the laps of the very “infestment” banksters that brought down the economy in the first place. No interest necessary Citi, or “Golden Sacks”.

The marching orders read that the “infestment” banksters were to go forward and increase their capital reserves, since they never really had enough to cover the 30-year long betting cycle of risky loans, and credit default swaps, which made them all very, very rich upper class-men. So, to follow through they went ahead and gambled taxpayer dollars at the Wall Street casino tables, as well as moved forward advancing bets in foreign currencies, commodities, and in other stock markets. In other words, much of the cash they borrowed for free went overseas, just as the jobs they took away from us by outsourcing our own manufacturing livelihoods.

Bennie the Beard was crowned Man of the Year by Time magazine, even though he wrongly spoke about the security of our economy. Bada Bing Bernanke once said that the banks were not involved with sub-prime lending. In 2007, this economic crime syndicate field marshal general said, “ Importantly, we see no serious broad spill over to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the sub-prime market…The troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been institutions with federally insured deposits.” Wow!! Was this guy trying to do some stand-up?

It is hard to believe that since Bernanke, a PhD and expert in the Great Depression, was so successful selling so much propaganda about the economy, that he was able to be crowned Man of the Year. No doubt, he actually sold policymakers on taking a revised version of Alan Greenspan’s prior bag of crap and made it stick to the wall, such as believing that financial innovations were good for the economy and made banking safer!!! He threw up against the Wall of Crap a belief that our economy had entered a time in history that ushered in smaller and less frequent downturns, which he coined “the great moderation.”

These sweet-as-pie assessments of our grand ‘ole economy were made back in 2007 just before he went squawkin’ to Congress warning about a falling sky Chicken Little style; yet, Bennie The Beard was reading a brand of his homegrown tea leaves as the sky came raining down with Humpty Dumpty type banks, mortgage foreclosures, and failed financial innovations burning down the house so much that he needed a backhoe to get himself out from under the charred rubble. And, that backhoe was driven by Congress, which was blackmailed into accepting the Paulson-Bernanke-BushBoy economic extortion plan.

As we all know, five of ten of the nation’s largest “infestment” banking institutions were underwater with sub-prime loans that had to be bailed out by their field marshal general stationed at the Federal Reserve headquarters. These banksters were so worried that they demanded from Congress the creation of a $700 billion bankster rescue program called TARP.

The reality is that Bennie The Beard actually failed to protect America’s depositors, homeowners, and investors to the tune of $12 trillion!!! Now, if that legacy deserves Man of the Year, then what would it take to deserve the dishonor of the Worst Man of the Year?

As the year progressed, the promise to end the war in Iraq became just an exaggeration.

Today, we are still in Iraq, and have escalated the troop deployment in Afghanistan. The war profiteers continue their gleeful praises of our President. The stockholders of GE, General Dynamics, Halliburton, KBR, and the rest are so happy to see their end-of-the-year dividend/ 1099s all coming in profitably. In addition, Blackwater, ie. Xe, and now remade into The U.S. Training Center. Even though Eric Prince, its commander-in-chief, should be put on trial as a war criminal. Our government continues to use Prince’s private, mercenary military force overseas, too.

As we move threw the year, the bankstes were paying out huge bonuses funded by the taxpayers through various Fed and Treasury programs. There were no significant regulatory changes, nor the elimination of too-big-to-fail. The mega-banks were even allowed to become bigger as they gobbled up closed down smaller banks.

None of the mega-banking CEOs or top executives has been jailed for fraud, either. The Justice department has not done any serious, large scale investigations clearly defining why this economic fraud occurred, who were the ones to blame, and why are they still smiling.

We saw a token “real” economy bailout of only a couple billion dollars because the remainder of the economic stimulus package bailout went into tax-cuts. The Republicans hijacked a Democratic Congress, once again. The unemployed-under employed-no longer looking for work, and the part time wanting full time unemployment picture has reached a near Depression era aggregate figure of almost 20%. 16 million unemployed.

Foreclosures grew to 1 in 6 homeowners. Those still paying mortgages, but are now underwater is around 1 in 4.

Wages continue to erode or stay stagnant. Those who are leery of losing their jobs have cut back on their spending.

34,750 lobbyists continue to infect our government with powers that are unprecedented.

Corporate bankruptcies are looming on the horizon. Bank credit card defaults and those 30-60-90 days delinquent have been on the upswing. Professor Elizabeth Warren, PhD, and chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Bailout Committee has warned our president that we could be on the brink of losing our middle class!!!

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Just keeps gettin' better... And why more people care?!

By Christine Harper

Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- In the first six months of 2010, about 6,000 employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will take a break from their spreadsheets and move across the southern tip of Manhattan to a new 43-story, steel-and-glass skyscraper.

The building was a bargain -- and not just because the final cost is expected to be $200 million less than the $2.3 billion price the company had estimated when construction began in November 2005. Goldman Sachs also benefited from the government’s determination to avoid losing jobs in lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Building a new headquarters cater-cornered to where the World Trade Center once stood qualified the firm to sell $1 billion of tax-free Liberty Bonds and get about $49 million of job-grant funds, tax exemptions and energy discounts. Henry Paulson, then Goldman Sachs’s chief executive officer, threatened to abandon the project after delays in addressing his concerns about safety. To keep the plan on track, state and city officials raised the bond ceiling to $1.65 billion and added $66 million in benefits. The interest expense on the financing is about $175 million less over 30 years than if the company had issued corporate debt at the time, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“It was absolutely imperative that Goldman Sachs keep its world headquarters downtown,” says John Cahill, who took part in the negotiations as chief of staff to then-Governor George Pataki and now works at New York law firm Chadbourne & Parke LLP. “They had the financial resources to move anywhere.”
Unprecedented Aid
Goldman Sachs, which set a Wall Street profit record of $11.6 billion in 2007 and may have earned $11.4 billion this year, according to the average estimate of 15 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, won new and larger concessions from taxpayers in 2008. This time it was the threat of a financial meltdown that prompted the U.S. government, with Paulson as Treasury secretary, and the Federal Reserve to supply an unprecedented amount of aid to firms deemed critical to the financial system, including Goldman Sachs.
The 140-year-old company received $10 billion in capital, guarantees on about $30 billion of debt and the ability to borrow cheaply from the Fed. The Fed’s bailout of American International Group Inc., and its decision to pay the insurer’s counterparties in full, funneled an additional $12.9 billion to Goldman Sachs.
“What was done was appropriate because the potential costs of not doing that were probably exceedingly high,” says Gary Stern, who stepped down in August as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. “It certainly looked very threatening.”
‘Bad Deal’
That’s not how the Goldman Sachs rescue looks to William Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. He says the government has been far too generous in allowing the firm to get federal backing without either seizing equity or curbing risks.
“It’s just an unbelievably bad deal,” Black says. “We could hire any middle-tier guy or gal at Goldman, and they would tell us within 15 seconds that the deal we have made as a nation with Goldman is underpriced by many, many orders of magnitude and that we are insane.”
During the past year, Goldman Sachs’s profits and compensation outstripped those of its rivals. The firm, now the nation’s fifth-largest bank by assets, reported a record $8.44 billion in earnings for the first nine months of 2009 after setting aside $16.7 billion to pay employees. That comes to $527,192 for each person on the payroll, almost eight times the median U.S. household income.
Public Anger
The company’s stock is up 93 percent this year, above its price before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed. Meanwhile, the U.S. unemployment rate hit a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October before dropping to 10 percent in November.
The perception that Goldman Sachs has profited at the expense of taxpayers has fueled public anger -- even jabs from the television comedy show “Saturday Night Live.” Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi described the firm this year as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” Conservative television commentator Glenn Beck devoted a 10- minute segment in July to diagramming Goldman Sachs’s connections to the government and arguing that taxpayers were being spun in “a web of lies.”
Bonus Plan
“People are just really angry; you can see it on the left and the right,” says Andy Stern, president of the 2.1 million- member Service Employees International Union, who led about 200 protesters outside Goldman Sachs’s Washington office on Nov. 16 to demand that the firm cancel its year-end bonuses and repay taxpayers instead. Some carried “Wanted” posters with pictures of Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
The firm has made attempts to placate critics. On Nov. 17, it announced a five-year, $500 million program to provide education, capital and other forms of support to small businesses. On Dec. 10, it promised to pay the bonuses of the firm’s top 30 executives only in stock that they can’t sell for five years.
To Blankfein, the 55-year-old postal worker’s son who earned $68.5 million in 2007, the firm’s ability to generate profits and reward employees is a boon to society.
“Our shareholders are pensioners, mutual funds and individual investors, and they’re all taxpayers,” Blankfein told investors at a Nov. 10 conference hosted by Bank of America Corp. in New York. “The people of Goldman Sachs are one of the most productive workforces in the world.”
No ATMs
What Goldman Sachs’s workforce produces is different from what employees do at other financial institutions, leading some people to question why the firm is entitled to taxpayer support. It doesn’t operate branches or automated-teller machines. Only millionaires can open checking accounts. Instead, Goldman Sachs exists to serve large corporations, governments, institutions and wealthy individuals.
It makes money for them and for itself by trading assets ranging from stocks and bonds to oil futures and credit derivatives. In the first nine months of 2009, more than 90 percent of the company’s pretax earnings came from trading and principal investments, which include market bets, stakes in corporate debt and equity, and assets such as power plants.
“People who know the industry and know Goldman Sachs know that it is a giant hedge fund, but it’s wrapped in an investment banking wrapper,” says Samuel Hayes, a professor emeritus of investment banking at Harvard Business School in Boston. The public “would be horrified to think that their tax dollars were going to a hedge fund.”
Repaying TARP
Goldman Sachs repaid the $10 billion it received in October 2008 from the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, and taxpayers got a return: $318 million in preferred dividends and $1.1 billion to cancel warrants to buy company stock the government was granted. Goldman Sachs says that’s a 23 percent annualized return for U.S. taxpayers, according to the firm’s calculation.
Other forms of support linger. By the end of September, Goldman Sachs’s $189.7 billion of long-term unsecured borrowings included $20.9 billion guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. under a program started in October 2008 to unfreeze credit markets, according to the firm’s most recent quarterly filing. Most importantly, the Federal Reserve agreed on Sept. 21, 2008, to allow Goldman Sachs and smaller rival Morgan Stanley to become bank holding companies, giving them access to the Fed’s discount window and granting them a cheap source of borrowing traditionally reserved for commercial banks.
Interest Expense
“The issue that people have focused on -- TARP and the payback of TARP money -- is insignificant compared with the way they’ve been able to use federally guaranteed programs and their access to the Fed window,” says Peter Solomon, founder of New York-based investment bank Peter J. Solomon Co.
Those benefits, along with a drop in the Fed’s benchmark borrowing rate to as low as zero, have slashed Goldman Sachs’s interest costs to the lowest this decade, though its debt was higher in the first nine months of 2009 than in any comparable period except the previous two years. For those three quarters, the firm’s interest expense fell to $5.19 billion from $26.1 billion a year earlier.
“You can’t give a small group of firms this privilege, where they get free money from the Fed and a taxpayer guarantee and they can run the biggest hedge fund in the world,” Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University and author of “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World,” said at a Nov. 18 panel discussion in New York.
‘Using Your Money’
That view is shared by Solomon. “Everybody thinks they’re a bank, but they’re a hedge fund,” he says. “The difference is that this year they’re using your money to do it.”
Lucas van Praag, the partner responsible for the firm’s communications and the only Goldman Sachs executive willing to comment for this story, denies any similarity to hedge funds, the mostly private and unregulated pools of capital that managers use to buy or sell assets while participating in the profits.
“The assertion that we’re a hedge fund displays a substantial misunderstanding of our business,” says van Praag, 59, a British-born former public relations executive who joined Goldman Sachs after it went public in 1999. “We are in business primarily to facilitate transactions for our clients, and over 90 percent of our revenue and earnings come from doing that.”
Proprietary Trading
Proprietary trading, in which Goldman Sachs employees make bets with the company’s own money, has contributed only 12 percent of the firm’s revenue since 2003, van Praag says. Still, fixed-income, currency, commodity and some equity trading that takes place off exchanges blurs the line between client-driven transactions and proprietary wagers, says Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York who rates Goldman Sachs stock “outperform.”
“It’s coming onto my balance sheet, I’m owning it and then I’m selling it,” Hintz says. “The fact that I’m taking a position means I’m taking risk, and if I’m taking risk, then I’m taking a proprietary bet.”
If Goldman Sachs agrees to buy $1 billion of mortgages that a client wants to sell and then decides to keep the mortgages, it’s not easy to determine whether that trade is aimed at helping a client or is a proprietary investment decision, Hintz says.
Van Praag says that Goldman Sachs, unlike some other banks, was never in imminent danger of going out of business during the financial crisis unless the entire system was allowed to implode.
‘We Didn’t Wait’
“We had cash and funding that would have allowed us to survive for quite a long time, even assuming that counterparties had decided to stop providing financing,” van Praag says. “When markets became very difficult, we didn’t wait for the government to act. We went out and raised money in the private sector.”
Two days after winning the Fed’s approval to become a bank holding company, Goldman Sachs sold $5 billion of preferred stock to billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and then raised another $5.75 billion by selling common stock to the public. Those deals, plus a $5.75 billion public offering in April 2009, helped raise shareholder equity to $65.4 billion from $45.6 billion in August 2008.
Goldman Sachs also cut the amount of assets it owns to $882 billion from $1.08 trillion before the Lehman collapse. The firm holds $167 billion in cash or near-cash instruments, up from about $102 billion at the end of August 2008, which it can use to pay off debts if creditors stop making loans.
‘Classic Bank Run’
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Dec. 4 that no bank would have survived without the government’s help.
“The entire U.S. financial system and all the major firms in the country, and even small banks across the country, were at that moment at the middle of a classic run -- a classic bank run,” he said.
Since the government stepped in, investors have been more willing to lend money to Goldman Sachs. The premium bondholders charge to own the firm’s bonds that mature in April 2018 instead of U.S. Treasuries of the same maturity has shrunk to less than 1.5 percentage points from as much as 6.8 percentage points on Nov. 20, 2008, according to data compiled by Trace, the bond- price reporting system of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The spread isn’t as narrow as the 0.99 percentage point premium to Treasuries that Goldman paid on new 10-year bonds in January 2006, the data show.
‘Backstopped’
At an Oct. 15 breakfast sponsored by Fortune magazine, Blankfein said that market prices prove that investors don’t think the bank has a government guarantee.
“We’re not exactly borrowing at the government rate,” he said. “The market isn’t behaving that way.”
Sean Egan -- co-founder of Haverford, Pennsylvania-based Egan-Jones Ratings Co., which in October gave Goldman Sachs an AA rating, its third highest -- has a different view.
“We’re in the business of doing credit analysis, and we’ve come to the conclusion that essentially Goldman Sachs is backstopped,” Egan says.
William Larkin, who manages about $250 million in fixed- income investments at Cabot Money Management Inc. in Salem, Massachusetts, says he owns Goldman Sachs bonds partly because he thinks the company won’t be allowed to go out of business.
“They would be bailed out” if anything went wrong, Larkin says. “Goldman right now is in a catbird seat because it’s very important to keep them healthy.”
Fewer Competitors
Chief Financial Officer David Viniar takes issue with the idea that the firm continues to benefit from an implied guarantee by the U.S. government.
“We operate as an independent financial institution that stands on our own two feet,” Viniar, 54, told reporters on an Oct. 15 conference call. “We don’t think we have a guarantee.”
The firm has grown more dominant in the past year, increasing its market share, Viniar told analysts on Oct. 15. It has benefited from having fewer competitors -- Bear Stearns Cos., Merrill Lynch & Co. and Lehman Brothers were all subsumed into other banks during the financial crisis -- while larger rivals such as Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG have been hobbled by writedowns and a lower appetite for risk.
“The crisis has created an oligopoly,” says Solomon, who founded his firm in 1989 after leaving Lehman Brothers.
Value-at-Risk
Goldman Sachs has also increased the size of the bets it’s making. Its value-at-risk -- an estimate of how much the trading desk could lose in a single day -- jumped to an average of $231 million in the first nine months of 2009, a record for the firm. At the end of September, the company estimated that a 10 percent drop in corporate equity held by its merchant-banking funds would cost it $1.04 billion, up from $987 million at the end of June.
Revenue generated by trading and investing, the most unpredictable part of Goldman Sachs’s business, accounted for 79 percent of the firm’s revenue in the first nine months of 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. Early the next year, before Goldman Sachs’s initial public offering, executives, led by Paulson, told investors the company would try to decrease the percentage.
The government is acting schizophrenically by arguing that Goldman Sachs needs taxpayer support because it poses a risk to the financial system at the same time as it’s failing to do anything to curtail that risk, says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who teaches at Columbia University in New York.
“We say they’re too big to fail, but we refuse to do anything about their being too big to fail,” Stiglitz says. “We say that they represent systemic risk, but we don’t regulate them effectively.”
‘Biggest Single Gift’
Stiglitz also points to the Fed’s $182.3 billion AIG bailout as an example of how policy has been tilted to support Goldman Sachs.
“The biggest single gift was the AIG rescue,” he says. “No one has ever provided a good argument for why we did it other than we were bailing out Goldman Sachs.”
On Sept. 16, 2008, a day after Lehman filed the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the Fed authorized Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to lend $85 billion to help AIG avoid a similar fate by allowing it to continue to post collateral owed on contracts and to settle securities-lending agreements. Geithner later told a Congressional Oversight Panel that the government acted because “the entire system was at risk.”
$12.9 Billion
In November, the Fed created two entities: Maiden Lane II to repurchase securities that had been lent out in return for cash, and Maiden Lane III to purchase collateralized-debt obligations so AIG could cancel the credit-default swaps, similar to insurance policies, it had written on them. In the latter program, the Fed allowed the counterparties to settle contracts at 100 percent of their value.
Goldman Sachs was the biggest beneficiary, receiving a total of $12.9 billion in cash, consisting of $5.6 billion to cancel insurance on CDOs, $4.8 billion to repurchase securities and $2.5 billion of collateral.
If Goldman Sachs and AIG’s other counterparties hadn’t been paid off in full by the Fed, they might have taken losses on their contracts.
Other bond insurers had canceled agreements by paying less than par. Merrill Lynch accepted $500 million from Security Capital Assurance Ltd. in late July 2008 to tear up contracts guaranteeing $3.7 billion of CDOs. On Aug. 1, 2008, Citigroup agreed to accept $850 million from bond insurer Ambac Financial Group Inc. to cancel a guarantee on a $1.4 billion CDO.
Barofsky Report
In a Nov. 16 report on the AIG bailout, Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for TARP, said the Fed tried for two days to negotiate with counterparties, an effort that failed because the Fed felt obliged to make any discounts voluntary and because French counterparties said they couldn’t legally be required to comply. Goldman Sachs refused to negotiate because it felt it was hedged if AIG failed to pay, Barofsky wrote.
“Notwithstanding the additional credit protection it received in the market, Goldman Sachs (as well as the market as a whole) received a benefit from Maiden Lane III and the continued viability of AIG,” Barofsky wrote. Goldman Sachs would have been saddled with the risk of further declines in the market value of about $4.3 billion in CDOs as well as some $5.5 billion of CDSs, he added.
‘Fascination With AIG’
Viniar, who held a conference call in March to answer questions about the firm’s relationship with AIG, said Goldman Sachs didn’t need a bailout because the firm’s hedges meant it faced no significant losses if AIG failed.
“I am mystified by this fascination with AIG,” he said in an interview in April. “In the context of Goldman Sachs, they’re one of thousands and thousands of counterparties, and the results of any trading with AIG are completely immaterial to what we do. Always have been, and always will be.”
Suspicions that the fix was in for Goldman Sachs have been fanned by the firm’s political connections.
Paulson worked at the company for 32 years, the last eight of them as CEO, before becoming Treasury secretary in 2006. Geithner selected former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson to serve as his chief of staff at Treasury. Stephen Friedman, a former senior partner who serves on the company’s board, stepped down as chairman of the New York Fed in May amid controversy over his purchases of the firm’s shares in December 2008 and January 2009 after it became a bank holding company regulated by the Fed. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council director, worked earlier in their careers under former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was once co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Geithner’s successor as New York Fed president is William Dudley, a former chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs.
Political Contributions
Goldman Sachs and its employees have donated $31.4 million to U.S. political parties since 1989, more than any other financial institution and the fourth-highest amount of any organization, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group.
Regulators and lawmakers are attempting to make changes that they say will protect taxpayers in the future. One proposal being considered by the U.S. Congress is to require financial institutions whose failure could cause a breakdown of the entire system to hold more liquid assets and a larger buffer of capital to help absorb losses.
The bill would also empower regulators to step in and liquidate a major financial institution, or merge it with another, rather than bail it out or let it collapse.
Safety Net
That’s not enough for Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman who serves as an economic adviser to Obama. Volcker, 82, has argued that the government safety net should be limited to financial institutions that provide utilitylike services such as deposit taking and business-payment processing essential to economic functioning. All risk-taking functions should be done separately, he says.
“I do not think it reasonable that public money --taxpayer money -- be indirectly available to support risk-prone capital market activities simply because they are housed within a commercial-banking organization,” Volcker said in a Sept. 16 speech at a conference in California.
Asked about Goldman Sachs in a Dec. 11 interview in Berlin, Volcker said, “They can do trading and do anything they want, but then they shouldn’t have access to the safety net.”
Black, the former bank regulator, agrees.
“The answer is not to give these guarantees but to make sure there are no more systemically dangerous institutions,” he says. “They shouldn’t be allowed to grow, and of course, that’s what they’re doing right now. They’re mostly growing like crazy.”
Ground Zero
On a cold, rainy morning in December, rust-colored beams poke above a fence that surrounds the construction pit at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Across West Street, workers in yellow slickers are landscaping the strips that separate the entrance to Goldman Sachs’s new headquarters from the highway. In the lobby, a brightly colored abstract painting by Ethiopian- American artist Julie Mehretu, which cost about $5 million, greets employees who have already relocated.
The new building has twice as much space and costs 14 times as much as Goldman Sachs’s old headquarters a half mile (0.8 kilometer) away. Two American flags the size of bed sheets dominate the stone and concrete facade of the 30-story building at 85 Broad St., constructed almost three decades ago when Goldman Sachs was a private partnership with about 2,700 employees in New York.
In 1983, the year the firm moved in, it had pretax earnings of $462 million, one-twenty-fifth of what it made in 2007.
While Goldman Sachs has outgrown its old headquarters, one thing hasn’t changed: It’s still getting subsidies to remain in lower Manhattan. When it built 85 Broad St., the company received about $9 million in incentives to stay, according to a press report at the time. Now, it’s getting $115 million -- an amount dwarfed by the funds U.S. taxpayers provided in the heat of the 2008 financial crisis.
To contact the reporter on this story: Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net

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This month the biggest Wall Street companies reported their quarterly earnings. JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs reported bumper earnings, Citgroup and Bank of America, not so good. But if you leave out write downs on debt, everyone had a great quarter in their capital markets businesses. Billions have been budgeted for year end bonuses.

As could be expected, the issue of Wall Street compensation raised its head again. And this time there is the weight of the federal government behind it. Banks that have taken TARP money will see their executive compensation capped. And the Federal Reserve has suggested that all large banks that fall under its jurisdiction will be reviewed on on going basis to ensure that executive bonuses do not produce risk taking behavior that could put the banking system at risk.

There are several memes that get mixed up in any discussion about Wall Street compensation in the media. Add a lot of emotion from a distraught public and it becomes for a tangled mess where the media feeds the furore but there’s no real understanding of the underlying issues. Let’s see if we can parse the issues out.

These are the issues as they are played out in the media
- Issue #1 – The taxpayer bailed out Wall Street. How can they pay themselves these kinds of bonuses.
- Issue #2 – The rest of the country is going through agonizing pain – high unemployment, pay freezes and cuts – how can these people pay themselves what they do?
- Issue #3 – Their companies have been (and some still are) hemorrhaging cash. How can they pay their investment bankers so much?

I don’t think any of these issues merit any attention from lawmakers. #1 could be argued many ways but at the end of the day, if the bank has taken TARP money and hasn’t yet returned it, the federal government as shareholder with special rights, can do as it pleases. Politics dictates that compensation should be curbed and so it will be. #2 amounts to appealing to a cold corporation’s heart – a futile endeavor. #3 is the company’s call. They have a board and shareholders. If they think that they need to pay top dollar to retain talent, then that’s what they need to do.

In my mind there are two fundamental issues that need consideration. One, is related to risk increasing compensation practices. The second is a larger issue of high, untrammeled growth in the capital markets in the last two decades.

On the first issue, everyone agrees that Wall Street’s bonus bonanzas encourage traders and management to pile on the risk, collect their super size bonuses and when things turn south, leave the shareholders to pick up the pieces. And when things go really really bad, like what happened to the markets last year, let the federal government foot the bill.

What is not clear to me is why the shareholders just stand there and let this happen. The expectation that the bank is too big to fail and that the fed will bail you out, doesn’t explain it. If you were a shareholder in Citigroup and held the stock prior to the crash, even though you were bailed out, you probably lost your shirt on Citi.

I am not sure what the answer to this is. It could be that in the normal course of things, shareholders don’t really exert any influence on the board of the company. Election of board members and votes on CEO compensation, need to see a lot more vigor in the shareholder meetings, especially in the US.

Or it could be that shareholders think they’re smart and will be able to get out before the stuff hits the fan – a variant of what the trader or management thinks – except that the employee just loses her job, the shareholder his savings.

It could be that there isn’t enough disclosure. That Wall Street companies, on the pretext of not revealing proprietary information on trades and investments, is actually throwing a cloak on dodgy, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose schemes.

There could be other things going on that only behavioral economics can explain. Thinking that if everyone has been doing risky trades for so long then maybe its not that risky, is both irrational and perfectly natural.

Whatever, the reason behind it, this nexus between risk and compensation needs to be tackled head on. It is going to be a very tough problem. But not addressing it is not the answer.

The other question is also a big one. In the last two decades, the capital markets have grown much faster than the rest of the economy. The chart here shows that the profits in the US Financial sector went from about 15% of total corporate profits in 1998 to over 40% in 2007. When an industry grows at that pace, the competitive intensity is low and margins are high. The use of technology raises productivity further increasing margins. In the capital markets the only significant cost is the cost of people. When there is no or low downward pressure on prices, compensation has no place to go but up.

But is the ‘natural’ size of the industry as a share of GDP what it is today or what it was two decades ago? Can an industry that essentially allocates capital, and doesn’t really make anything, have such a large share of the GDP? Is there something in the laws of the land that make it so? For instance the credit rating industry, many say, is a creation of legislation and would not have existed at least in this twisted model of today, had it not been for an easy regulatory environment. Are there other such areas that would wilt in the face of an openly competitive field or lower entry barriers?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know that if the world has a problem with Wall Street traders, bankers and CEOs making tens of millions a year, not just in today’s recession, but beyond as well, we will need to look at taming the industry, not capping salaries. If that’s even possible at all.

Who are these people?
I am not referring to the pathetic parents of "Balloon Boy," whose fake drama I have been unable to escape while on the treadmill this week, thanks to my gym's insistence on tuning its flat-screen TVs to Wolf Blitzer's nonstop self-parody.
The Colorado incident was significant only in the tawdriness of those who perpetrated the made-for-TV scam and their allies in the mindless media who covered this sham "reality" so relentlessly. But even so it was enough to push aside most consideration of the true hoax reported last week with far less fervor: the obscene rewards that Wall Street bankers bestowed upon themselves for ripping off our economy.
The people I want to know more about are the superrich who expect to be rewarded for their failures, like the folks at Goldman Sachs who will receive $16.71 billion in bonuses--an average of $530,000 per employee--this year after their company did as much as any to bring the world economy to the brink of disaster.
"The Guys from Goldman Sachs" is what The New York Times once called them in recognition of their chokehold on the federal government. Their power is marked by the two treasury secretaries who led the fight to legally enable and then reward Wall Street for its obscene excesses. Why wasn't there a CNN stakeout at the homes of former Goldman-execs-turned-treasury-chiefs Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson aimed at finding out how they feel about the almost $7 billion profit that Goldman Sachs made in the last two quarters in the wake of the government's bailout of the firm?
They were both deeply involved last fall, along with Rubin protégé and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, in saving Goldman as archrival Lehman Brothers was forced to go belly up. As opposed to Lehman, Goldman was allowed to change its status and become a commercial bank qualifying for Federal Reserve and TARP funding. Goldman received $10 billion in immediate bailout funds, and we are supposed to be grateful that the company has paid it back in return for an end to any pretense of government control over its executive compensation. The additional cool $12.9 billion that Goldman received from the government as a pass-through from the bailout of AIG to cover Goldman's toxic paper is money the investment bank has no intention of ever paying back.
The rationale for saving Goldman and the other too-big-to-fail usurers was that the rescue would increase lending to businesses and consumers and thus revive the economy. But Goldman made money last quarter by shunning such loans and instead putting the government-guaranteed low-interest money it now can borrow toward acquisitions and bond and stock trading. As The New York Times reported: "Titans like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are making fortunes in hot areas like trading stocks and bonds, rather than the ho-hum business of lending people money."
Under the headline "Bailout Helps Fuel a New Era of Wall Street Wealth," Times reporter Graham Bowley detailed many of the enabling favors that the government, under two presidents, extended to Goldman, like clearing the way for the company to issue bonds guaranteed by the FDIC. "It may come as a surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall Street," the Times reported, "is not the banks but Washington. Many of the steps that policy makers took last year to stabilize the financial system--reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institution debts--helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth."
It should not come as a surprise to Timothy Geithner, who, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week, talks to the honchos of Goldman more often than to members of Congress ostensibly in charge of banking legislation. Nor will it shock the lobbyists for Wall Street--augmented, as The Nation reported last week, by the pro-Goldman efforts of former Democratic congressman and faux populist Dick Gephardt--that the rich will emerge richer from this deep recession in which so many Americans have lost everything. The die is cast: People working in finance grabbed two-thirds of the growth in GDP, with the rest of us scrambling for the other third.
Nor will the situation change anytime soon. The House Financial Services Committee is in charge of writing new rules to protect consumers, but as the respected Sunlight Foundation reports, 27 of the 71 members of that committee receive at least one-fourth of their campaign funds from the financial industry, with the rest of the committee members not far behind.
Now if we could get one of the banking lobbyists to float a duct-taped flying saucer balloon, Wolf Blitzer might cover the real hoax.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/zooming-in-on-the-years-b_b_328174.html

I don't know about you, but I am outraged.

I am outraged and not just about Goldman Sachs, but about a process that allows, even encourages political pandering, by time and time again rewarding leveraged riverboat gamblers and failed institutions and at taxpayer expense.

I am outraged that real people are suffering massively while the influence peddlers have stolen the country for their own personal benefit.

I am outraged at a political system that is totally unresponsive to the American people.

I am outraged by campaign contribution and lobbying processes that allows corporations to buy votes with donations.

I am outraged how legislators ignored the wishes of the people who clearly did not want these bailouts in the first place.

I am outraged that very little of this is in mainstream media. Why is this stuff not on the frontpage of every newspaper in the country or at least in the editorial pages?

I am outraged that the average US citizen is not aware of any of this, instead depending on CNBC, or "The View" for their interpretation of the world.

I am outraged how special interest groups have exercised their power to monopolize the economy for the benefit of themselves, US citizens be damned.

I am outraged that all these bailout programs are doing nothing to alleviate the massive consumer debt problems. Every program, virtually every program was designed to bailout lending institutions, not consumers.

I am outraged at fees charged by banks receiving bailouts.

I am outraged over government pension plans and government pay scales massively out of line with the private sector.

I am outraged that Congress and this administration thinks the solution to massive budget deficits are still higher budget deficits in excess of a trillion dollars.

I am outraged about indictments. Paulson Admitted Coercion to force a shotgun wedding between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch yet no indictments were handed out. Let the Criminal Indictments Begin: Paulson, Bernanke, Lewis.

I am outraged that US citizens are not concerned enough and not educated enough to demand change.

I am outraged that the two party system has failed. Neither party has delivered meaningful change on budgets, on taxes, on social security, on deficit spending, on the size of government, on military spending, or fighting needless wars.

I am outraged at a Fed that purports to be "inflation fighters" when the only source of inflation in the word are central bankers, and their fractional reserve lending policies.

I am outraged that Greenspan and Bernanke could not see a housing bubble that 1000 bloggers could see.

I am outraged at the selective memory of Bernanke when speaking to Congress about these problems.

I am outraged that Bernanke's one sided response to asset bubbles, letting them grow without end, then bailing out the financial institutions that cause them.

I am outraged the Fed exists at all. It is a useless organization that cannot see bubbles, that panders to banks, that supports inflationary policies that are tantamount to theft by fraud.

I am outraged that the Obama Administration promised changed and did not deliver. "Yes We Can" was a lie. The reality is "It's Business As Usual, Only Worse, With Higher Deficits".

I am outraged there is not enough outrage over this.

Where the hell is the outrage?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

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How do the banks fend off needed reform? Follow the money. A recent report by Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation shows that the 27 members of the House Financial Services Committee have received over one-fourth of their contributions from the FIRE (Finance, insurance and real estate sector). Ranking Republican Spencer Baucus from Alabama opposes the CFPA, arguing that we don't need "more regulation," we just need "smart regulation." He received a staggering 71% of his contributions from the finance sector over the first six months of this year (and 45% of his total contributions over his career). Democrat Melissa Bean who leads the effort to gut state regulatory authority over the banks has received fully 42% of her contributions for the first six months from the banking sector. Not surprisingly, the champions of reform like Rep. Alan Grayson, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison, Adam Putman, and Carolyn McCarthy all pull in the lowest percentage from the sector.

Historically, the banks, as Senator Dick Durbin decried in disgust, "own the place." And they've succeeded thus far in frustrating reform, even while pocketing literally hundreds of billions in support from taxpayers.

Terrific documentation made available by researchers at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) provides the details. Citigroup received about $341 billion from taxpayers in the bailout, and dispensed $4.9 million for lobbyists in the nine months after the bailout and $5.6 million in campaign contributions in 2008. (Talk about return on investment). Bank of America got $199 billion from the bailout and paid lobbyists $3.6 million in the nine months thereafter, while making campaign contributions of $7.2 million in 2008. Goldman Sachs pocketed a nifty $63.6 billion in bailout fund while setting aside $11.4 billion for bonuses and compensation for the first six months of 2009. (Lobbying fees $1.8 million; 2008 campaign contributions $7.1 million)

But this time it could be different. Backroom deals are no longer safe. Americans have been fleeced of trillions in the value of their homes and their savings because of Wall Street's reckless excesses. Then as taxpayers, they were extorted to ante up literally trillions more to forestall economic collapse by bailing out the banking sector. Insult was added to that injury when the Federal Reserve refused to tell the Congress who got the money and on what terms.

Legislators would be well advised to understand the cozy old ways of doing business are no longer acceptable. Americans are livid and paying attention. Legislators who rely on Wall Street to finance their campaigns and then lead the effort to block or dilute reforms will discover that their constituents know what they have been up to. Organizations like my own Campaign for America's Future, the Sunlight Foundation, Americans for Financial Reform, Huffington Post bloggers will make certain the word gets out. Legislators may discover that Wall Street's money is a burden, not a blessing.

The House committee's markup is the beginning of a long process that will make health care reform look like a summer's picnic. Legislators will have to decide what side they are on. It is up to us to make certain that they understand we will hold them accountable for the choice they make.



Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/will-we-curb-wall-streets_b_320549.html

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I just read in a news articles that AIG's executives slated for another round of mind-numbing bonuses were pointing to laws as reasons why the bonuses could not be interfered with by legislators or regulators. OK - suppose one agrees with them. I find such executives' as well as many other executives' throughout the financial industry respect for law admirable. I find their selective respect for law despicable--and it has also proven to be demonstrably hazardous to the health of the country.

Inevitably legislators and regulators will back off because they do not want to be seen as trifling with laws. What's puzzling to me however is why these legislators and regulators recognizing that such bonuses are outrageous and also corrosive of the financial and social system do not utilize other relevant laws which would be effective in controlling heedless and in many cases criminal executive behavior.

Executives in the financial sector who were oblivious to laws in amassing their fortunes now try to rely on laws to protect these fortunes and also to increase them. There are laws against fraud, unfair trade practices, and other germane matters. As the executives loudly now call for respect for the law, the legislators and regulators play along with them--while both groups concertedly look away from other laws. Thus the charade of the equitable application of the law goes on.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/will-we-curb-wall-streets_b_320549.html