This info is from the Guardian – I won’t be holding my breath waiting to see it appear in US newspapers.

I went through the Goldman Sachs quarterly report here. Here’s the conclusion:

In other words, GS trades capital around like monkeys, and justifies it by claiming it provides liquidity. That really takes great brain power. It’s like a continuous game of Tetris with other people’s money, only because you are so integrated into the game, you know where the pieces are long before they fall. Then, you take half the winnings and put it in your pocket. Of course, they do leave some tiny part for the people who put up the money. GS paid dividends of $642mn in fiscal 2008. That compares to $10.9bn in compensation and benefits. Did anyone get their money’s worth from any incidental improvement in liquidity?

Here’s a good question: I’m a shareholder of Goldman Sachs. They’re gambling with my money and paying themselves half the winnings. Why am I putting up with this for the paltry dividends? Is there a greater fool out there waiting to buy my stock?

I’m sure Jim will be the first to call for transparency on Goldman’s part and make sure their “surging revenues” are legitimate before they start shelling out these fat chunks of taxpayer dollars during a recession.

Say, ya wanna buy a bridge?

It might be time for a very public invitation to Congressman Himes – come on over for a little chat.

We might even want to invite his vanquished opponent.

It’s once again proof that “our” government no longer belongs to “us”, it belongs to wealthy donors, well-placed lobbyists and hangers-on with an agenda and an address inside the Beltway who whisper sweet nothings in the ears of regulators and congress critters accompanied by a small pile of cash in a plain white envelope.

They all talk a good game during election season, but somehow get amnesia when they reach the floor of their respective chamber…

Wow, just wow. This is blogging at its best.

You should post that, masaccio.

Am anxiously awaiting that, too.

That would be the vanquished opponent whose campaign manager stole thousands of dollars from his campaign.

Am I mistaken: Hank “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Paulsen is former Goldman Sachs, right? And his and Bernarke’s meddling last fall had the consequences of…reshuffling the competitive deck with the musical chairs ending up with:
Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (oops – one of GS’s competitors, right?)
Merrill Lynch (oops – another competitor, right?) being snapped up by Bank of America..
Oh, and that thing with AIG..
And at the same time, Paulson was screaming that the banks had to be bailed out because the economy was in the dumper because of lack of liquidity – that as soon as the banks got money, they’d start lending to business, the Spice Would Flow, and people would get put back to work again.
And that was a lie too — banks used the money to buy up other banks; banks are now using it to pay back the feds because they don’t want to have to follow the rules and…woopsie..banks are NOT using it to lend to business (as a matter of fact, bank lending to business has been going down, down, down ever since they got the damn money).
Anyone smell a rat (and his name is Hank..)?
I certainly hope that Mr. Paulsen’s buddies at BOA et al. and Goldman Sachs have something very nice in mind for HIM this year because no one has done as much for them over the past 12 months as Hank Paulsen.

It occurs to me that if we can’t get torturers and murderers into the dock for trial, we sure as hell aren’t gonna see mega-thieves there.

Please, never mention Paulson without giving credit to Bush, Greenspan, Geithner, Bernanke, Summers, and Obama.

Remember Grover Norquist’s answer to social programs: Create so much debt that the govt. won’t be able to afford them.

Seconded.

We’re getting there — the high irony comes when it’s time to have those who voted for these bailouts preach about “fiscal responsibility” for retirees whose nest eggs have just disappeared at the hands of Goldman Sachs.

Funny ha ha.

Former Goldman Sachs executive Jim Himes voted for every TARP bailout, for the $108 billion European bank bailout, for the war supplemental and every other spending bill that made its way down the pike. For him to now be talking about the need to “put on the brakes” and address the “massive unfunded liabilities associated with Social Security and Medicare” is really something.

That is really something. They always do this shit. We can’t afford Social Security, but a bailout of a multimillion dollar corporation, no problem!

re the tarp bailout, chris floyd had a post last fall i really liked: The God That Failed: The 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult

here’s a little bit from it:

Year after year, the ordinary citizens were told by their governments: we have no money to spend on your needs, on your communities, on your infrastructure, on your health, on your children, on your environment, on your quality of life. We can’t do those kinds of things any more.

Of course, when talking amongst themselves, or with the believers in the think tanks, boardrooms — and editorial offices — the cultists would speak more plainly: we don’t do those things anymore because we shouldn’t do them, we don’t want to do them, they are wrong, they are evil, they are outside the faith. But for the hoi polloi, the line was usually something like this: Budgets are tight, we must balance them (for a “balanced budget” is a core doctrine of the cult), we just can’t afford all these luxuries, sorry about that.

But now, as the emptiness and falsity of the Chicago cargo cult stands nakedly revealed, even to some of its most faithful and fanatical adherents, we can see that this 30-year mantra by our governments has been a deliberate and outright lie. The money was there — billions and billions and billions of dollars of it, trillions of dollars of it. We can see it before our very eyes today — being whisked away from our public treasuries and showered upon the banks and the brokerages.

Let’s say it again: The money was there all along.

Himes and friends will be happy to vote for health care “reform” too as long as it is turned into a disguised bailout of for-profit insurance companies (”public option” or not) and makes cuts in real government health insurance: Medicare.

Jane, I have to laugh.

There was such a Progressive effort to oust Shays and install Himes.

Himes portrayed himself, and was portrayed by his supporters, as such a good guy.

I’m pretty cynical, but I gave to him and got some friendly responses.

The laugh is on me.

Lesson learned: They all suck (with a couple exceptions — e.g., Kucinich).

Nice.

Oh you bet. As long as we’re forcing people to become customers of the insurance industry and don’t try to regulate the prices they charge or the services they deliver, I’m certain he’ll be happy to vote for yet another bailout.

We’ll make up the difference by forcing little old ladies to eat catfood.

My rage and contempt of TARP is now several months old and today’s Sac Bee
gave me more reasons to be really angry for the unbelievable hypocrisy of it all.

See http://www.sacbee.com/topstori…..63763.html
for the lead article (nearly three pages ) about a small West Sacramento, CA bank whose principles and friends have obscenely reaped benefits in the midst of receiving TARP funds, and the bank president says they’re operating within legal standards. If that’s the case then there sure has to be radical redefinitions of what is legal standards.

On the other hand, the sentiment well represents Scarecrow’s observations about Larry Summer’s regulatory philosophy on 6/13: (http://odownfiredoglake.com/diary/5748). The plan to maxmize Fed power in the financial regulatory proposals must be stopped, absolutely and categorically, all the more because of the anticipation that Obama plans to replace Bernanke with Summers. Larry’s and Timothy’s hands are all over the proposed regulatory reforms, very much reflecting the WALL STREET control of Congress. Both are steeped in the existing financial system and can’t conceive seeing outside of the box and knowing that the current arrangements are positively obscene. While Timothy, continuing to feign innocence, argue that the proposals are too strict for some and not strict enough for others, they certainly aren’t strict enough for decency, integrity and justice. But then neither he nor the right can see outside their self-protecting boxes. And no one I see is really pushing hard for outside the box standards.

I don’t have the cite, but there’s an article from NYT???? today about the FDIC closing three more small banks. The Sac Bee article specifically says that while the West Sac bank’s practices are and have been probably illegal on many fronts, relative to current law, FDIC is doing nothing to hold them accountable. And there was a recent article seen at HuffPost that said that FDIC was ignoring many, many small banks in horrible shape; don’t have cite.

On the other hand, the huge Sac Bee article includes a “little” side box describing the reporter’s methodology for developing the story from FDIC data (freely given – quite unlike the Treasury Department’s and Fed’s refusals to be transparent about TARP and other funds),area legal documents, and the bank’s actual documents. It represents a humonguous amount of investigative reporting, the like of which I had thought I might never see again. On the other hand, Sac Bee is one of the McClatchy papers and they are well known for their investigative journalism.

Tobywallin’s comment here

And that was a lie too — banks used the money to buy up other banks; banks are now using it to pay back the feds because they don’t want to have to follow the rules and…woopsie..banks are NOT using it to lend to business (as a matter of fact, bank lending to business has been going down, down, down ever since they got the damn money)….

is reflected in the Bee article.

Art 45’s comment: There was such a Progressive effort to oust Shays and install Himes…. brings to mind the senior couple from Hartford, CT visiting our small Sacto Episcopal church who shared their continued grief on the loss of the righteous Chris Shays and disgust for his successor…… Stupid progressives.

Thanks Jane for a great post and to those who added to the dialogue.

Blessings to all,

I think we all knew, on some level, that we’d been had. It, BARF (h/t Jane), gave them the perfect excuse not to carry through on all those marvelous campaign promises. We’d really like to, but in this new era of austerity, forced upon us by circumstances beyond our control, we’ll just have to trim those nasty entitlements instead!

Obama: The Bailout Just Ate Universal Health Care, Energy Policy, College . . .

This is truly disgusting. Taibbi has an article in Rolling Stone coming out this week. He blogs about Goldman here:

http://trueslant.com/matttaibb…..-all-time/

I think I recall Himes stating he wanted to get involved in the Dept of Transportation.

I reread this 2007 Mother Jones article with new eyes. It seems Goldman Sachs is involved in the privatization of America’s turnpikes, and Americans are now paying foreign consortiums (who are overseeing these roads for a profit) higher fees than before to ride on pre-existing American roads.

Re the campaign manager’s looting [dakine01 @ 9]:

spent nearly $200,000 on Red Sox tickets, limousine travel, mysterious withdrawals at the Foxwoods casino and a donation of more than $1,000 to his synagogue.

If he’d spent the entire $200K on Red Sox tickets, that would be okay by me.

Bad judgment to have diversified his criminality.