patrick.net

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine

Thanks for the link.. it wasn't there last week. As I understand it they (Rollin Stone) had so much interest in the article that they decided to put it up on the site.

fantastic article - I shared it with 30 of my closest friends.

It even reached Australia. I saw it on GHPC, then circulated it to a bunch of political economist friends...

Or is it all just conspiracy theory? ; )

Even if the article is a bit biased, the more general idea tha t the markets are not truly free, and can be manipulated, seems closer to reality than most would probably care to admit to. Take for instance the recent story that a a GS employee stole computer code code that if implemented, could manipulate the market. The fact that people were developing this kind of software to begin with only helps validate the assumption that the game is rigged.

I have seen the author 'MATT TAIBBI' on talk shows. He always struck me as a no-nonsense, non-sheeple kind of a reporter.

The most important part was how they infiltrated the government, got permission to do what was illegal for any other company, and various workers including past employees within government covered their activities and actually even had to get permission from Goldman to tell other departments of government how they had allowed Goldman to do things which were illegal for all other companies. This isn't a matter of business but simply a matter of power. Banksters have taken over the government and used that to steal the future from our children. Simple fact.
This article should be required reading for every single US Government high school class. America is dead. Freedom has failed. The elites now run the government.

>>It even reached Australia.

Sean, what happened to Different Sean? :-)

Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools

Commentary by Michael Lewis

July 28 (Bloomberg) -- From the moment I left Yale and started working for Goldman Sachs, I’ve felt uneasy interacting with those who don’t.

It’s not that I think less of Goldman outsiders than I did while I remained among you. It’s just that I feel your envy, and know that nothing I can do or say will ever persuade you that I am no more than human.

Thus, like many of my colleagues, I have adopted a strategy of never leaving Goldman Sachs, apart from a few brief, spasmodic attempts to make what you outsiders call “love” or “the beast with two backs.” Goldman recognizes how important it is for its people to replicate themselves. We bill no performance fees for the service.

Today, the sheer volume of irresponsible media commentary has forced us to reconsider our public-relations strategy. With every uptick in our share price it’s grown clearer that we who are inside Goldman Sachs must open a dialogue with you who are not. Not for our benefit, but for yours.

America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.

Rumor No. 1: “Goldman Sachs controls the U.S. government.”

Every time we hear the phrase “the United States of Goldman Sachs” we shake our heads in wonder. Every ninth-grader knows that the U.S. government consists of three branches. Goldman owns just one of these outright; the second we simply rent, and the third we have no interest in at all. (Note there isn’t a single former Goldman employee on the Supreme Court.)

What small interest we maintain in the U.S. government is, we feel, in the public interest. Our current financial crisis has its roots in a single easily identifiable source: the envy others felt toward Goldman Sachs.

The bozos at Merrill Lynch, the dimwits at Citigroup, the nimrods at Lehman Brothers, the louts at Bear Stearns, even that momentarily useful lunatic Joe Cassano at AIG -- all of these people took risks that no non-Goldman person should ever take, in a pathetic attempt to replicate Goldman’s financial returns.

For too long we have allowed others to emulate us. Now we are working productively with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the Congress to ensure that we alone are allowed to take the sort of risks that might destroy the financial system.

Rumor No. 2: “When the U.S. government bailed out AIG, and paid off its gambling debts, it saved not AIG but Goldman Sachs.”

The charge isn’t merely insulting but ignorant. Less responsible journalists continue to bring up the $12.9 billion we received from AIG, as if that was some kind of big deal to us. But as our CFO David Viniar explained back in March, we were hedged. Our profits from AIG “rounded to zero.”

People who don’t work at Goldman Sachs, of course, find this implausible: How could $12.9 billion round to zero? Easy, but you just need to understand the mathematics.

Let’s assume AIG transferred $12,880,560,250.34 of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs. A Goldman outsider, asked to round this number, might call it $12,880,560,250.00. That’s not how we look at it; at Goldman we always round to the nearest $50 billion, so anything less than $25 billion rounds to zero.

Think of it that way and you can see that $12,880,560,250.34 isn’t even close to not rounding to zero.

Rumor No. 3: “As the U.S. government will eat the losses if Goldman Sachs goes bust, Goldman Sachs shouldn’t be allowed to keep making these massive financial bets. At the very least the $11.4 billion Goldman Sachs already has set aside for employees in 2009 -- $386,429 a head, just for the first six months -- is unfair, as the U.S. taxpayer has borne so much of the risk of the wagers that generated the profits.”

Really, we don’t know where to begin with this one. It is wrong-headed in so many different ways!

Let’s begin with the idea that the taxpayer is running a bigger risk than we are. The billions he stands to lose are trivial; after all, they round to zero.

The real risk, when you think about it even for a minute, is the risk we take ourselves: that Goldman will cease to exist and we will cease to be Goldman employees. To flirt with such tragedy we obviously need to be paid.

Rumor No. 4: “Goldman employees all look alike.”

Several recent newspaper photos have revealed that a surprising number of Goldman Sachs workers are white, male and bald. That non-Goldman people glance at such photos and think “Holy crap, they even look alike!” just shows how deeply anti- Goldman bigotry runs in American life.

We at Goldman represent unique clusters of DNA; if we bear some faint surface resemblance to one another, and to creatures from the 24th century, it is only because our superior powers of reasoning lead us to hold in our minds exactly the same thoughts, at exactly the same time.

A shared disinterest in growing hair, for instance, isn’t a coincidence of nature but an expression of healthy like- mindedness.

“The world is a pool table,” our naked-headed CEO likes to tell us. “And all the people in it are either stripes or solids. You alone are the cue balls.”

Rumor No. 5: Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Those words are of course taken from a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and they are transparently false.

For starters, the vampire squid doesn’t feed on human flesh. Ergo, no vampire squid would ever wrap itself around the face of humanity, except by accident. And nothing that happens at Goldman Sachs -- nothing that Goldman Sachs thinks, nothing that Goldman Sachs feels, nothing that Goldman Sachs does --ever happens by accident.

(Michael Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side,” soon to be a major motion picture. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Michael Lewis at mlewis1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: July 27, 2009 21:00 EDT

http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a2X3hNaWcbeg

justme says

>>It even reached Australia.
Sean, what happened to Different Sean?

Well, the original Sean stopped posting ages ago, and I'm on a couple of other forums now, so I thought I'd harmonise the names... although I can't change it on the 'other' patrick BB so easily...

A lot of the old gang seem to be gone now, shame... FAB and randy and surfer and SFwoman etc

Yeah, too bad, it would not hurt with some more activity fromformer regulars.

Vicente

Good counter article. Let me clear that although the article I reference calls out GS in particular, the bigger issue here is the fact that the large financial firms have too much influence on both matters of economics and matters of political policy.