Today Carl Levin asked Goldman Sach’s Daniel Sparks about his “sales pitch,” quoting from a memo written by Sparks: “They structured like mad.  They traveled the world and worked their tails off to make lemonade from some big old lemons.” Just in case anyone wondered if Goldman knew it was peddling garbage,

Senate theater over financial reform won’t be complete until Harry Reid starts banging on about “cots in the Senate” (remember that one?) But I think Alvin Felzenberg has it just about right: What we are watching being played in the Senate is a farce performed in the theater of the absurd. The plot is simple. [...]

Tim Carney says Goldman is using the GOP and the Democrats for a one-two punch to game regulation reform, just like the drug companies and AHIP did on the health care bill: At least three times in Goldman’s conference call Tuesday, spokesmen trumpeted the firm’s support for more federal control. Vague public calls for “reasonable [...]

Today, starting at 11 pm, the House Financial Services Committee will begin hearings on the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its role in the financial crisis. The hearing will be broadcast live on C-SPAN 3. Expected to testify: a who’s who of the world of financial regulation. Former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, Dick Fuld, [...]

The Obama administration, in its push to get the House to vote for the Senate’s health care reform bill unchanged, is pointing to the serious issue of lack of competition in the health insurance market as a powerful reason for reform. Obama’s health care proposal, however, no longer does much to actually solve the problem. [...]

Just as the tea parties were getting going in April of 2009, the White House met with bankers in the wake of the AIG scandal who told them to put the kibosh on the harsh anti-bank rhetoric. And so calls went out from the White House to the unions to put a pin in it.

They did.

Which left the field wide open for the tea parties (who were being heavily juiced by Fox News) to reap all of the economic discontent. “Our side” abandoned the field.

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Everyone is all over the Goldman Sachs report on health care reform. They may become the new villains in health care reform. They did say the public option would get a majority of customers on the exchange. Harry Reid is building his email list based on his support for the public option. His text message [...]

The HuffingtonPost has a fascinating look at the Goldman Sachs analysis of the effect of health care reform on the private insurances companies. Their basic conclusion is that any reform, even under the weaker Baucus bill, would be bad for the insurance companies. Of course, they concluded that the Baucus bill would be dramatically less [...]

Goldman says the “bear case” scenario — in which earnings per share for the top five insurers would decline an estimated one percent from 2010 through 2019 and the variance with current valuation is projected to be negative 36 percent. If nothing is done, they estimate stock prices will increase 47%.