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If Matt Taibbi wrote an article on a stick of poo and mailed it to me, I'd still read every word.

• cynicalkane 17y ago
  I find the idea of Matt Taibbi writing articles made of poo to be metaphorically appropriate. It depresses me that these screeds find a place on this website. It should be obvious, by the tone, polemical nature, and carefully arranged blindness of the above article, that no valuable or contextually useful information could be got out of it. It further puzzles me that it has become trendy to attack the financial market's most successful and profitable large institution. This proto-Marxist sentiment has no place in a free society. The only people forced to trade with Goldman were taxpayers financing the bailouts, and you know what happened to them? They got all their money back plus twenty-three percent interest.
  • Estragon 17y ago
    Could you point this blindness out to me?
  • Snark7 17y ago
    Actually Matt Taibbi is, apparently, one of the very few members of the press to have the intelligence, motivation, and opportunity to attack Goldman repeatedly. Everyone else is on a 24-hour news cycle, and as far as I can tell, Blankfein taking the $9 million bonus effectively defused the situation, especially after it was leaked that his bonus could be $100 million. Setting this up and getting the press to report the relatively low bonus was a brilliant PR coup, and it appears to have worked. That being said, I don't have any issue with his efforts at muckraking - I believe in freedom of the press after all.
    • cynicalkane 17y ago
      That makes him a fanatic, but it doesn't say anything about his correctness. The other thing is that, though I'm sure Goldman's decision was partially PR-motivated, it's what they should be doing anyway.
      • rrhyne 17y ago
        Pulling back on Loyd's bonus was a substance-less ploy. They received over tens of billion in bailouts, plus loans at 0% on MY dime, plus 100% in payouts on 5.9b on a bankrupt company. Because if this, they posted 13b in profits and paid out 16 billion in bonuses. Do the math and they should be out of business. Instead our corporate socialist state (fascism) paid those bonuses with my taxes.
    • binspace 17y ago
      The public needs an outlet for it's anger. Hopefully some real reform takes place. If not, then let the dissatisfaction grow.
      • cynicalkane 17y ago
        Reform by itself isn't want people need--the reform has to be good. All you have to do is look at any country dominated by stupid reformers to see the effects of stupid reform. Heck, just look at the history of socialism.
        • jbooth 17y ago
          Or the history of reform. I seem to recall a few years ago all of the smart "capitalists"* were telling us that we should put our SS money in the market. Around 2005-2006, if I recall correctly. Good thing we didn't do it. *"capitalists" in scare quotes to the extent that it may describe oligarchists rather than believers in true competition.
          • cynicalkane 17y ago
            That's not "capitalists", that's the financial media. Most of the people I know who are involved in finance consider the financial media to be pretty stupid. Finally, the financial media tell you to do all kinds of orthogonal and contradictory things, only some of which was to put all your money in the market. In fact, most advise and would have advised the opposite. So, I don't see the point of what you are saying.
            • jbooth 17y ago
              The financial media and all "capitalists" who've been exposed to the downside of the risks they took. All that talk of individual responsibility and keep the government out of financial markets evaporated real fast, if I recall correctly. Of course, now it's back again. It's as if 2008-2009 never even happened. EDIT: My bad, you didn't get my initial reference. In 2005, a bunch of the "capitalists" were saying we should privatize social security and put it in the market. I was saying that would have been dumb. Regardless of how "capitalist" it may have been.
  • asmithmd1 17y ago
    Did you read the article? there is some information in there: "Goldman and Morgan Stanley, applied for, and received, federal permission to become bank holding companies." Now they can borrow from the Fed for 0% interest. What did they do with the money - certainly not loan it to real businesses - they bought 10 year T bills that pay 3% to 4%. That is the quickest scam to explain. But basically these "Investment Banks" are not investing any money in the real economy - they are just making bigger and bigger gambles with the explicit knowledge they are "too big to fail" and we will be on the hook for when their bets don't go the right way for them.
    • cynicalkane 17y ago
      I work in the industry, and I heard about the bank holding thing the hour it was announced. I don't think investment banks should have access to Fed money, but the argument for this is a bit more subtle than Taibbi's article. Furthermore, the idea of investment banks as giant casinos is wrong. A bank like Goldman does not make a large number of directional bets, and when they do, they win on average. (They've certainly been winning throughout the crisis.) That a large number of banks lost a lot of money because of a government-fueled housing bubble is not Goldman's fault.
      • asmithmd1 17y ago
        I think we probably agree more than disagree. Morgan Stanley and Goldman are not banks so they should not have access to Fed money. And sure, they should be allowed to make whatever bets in whatever size they want - as long as they are small enough to fail. If they are too big to fail them I am on the hook for when their bets go bad. Any business that is too big to fail is too big. We successfully broke-up Standard Oil and AT&T and we are much better off for it.
        • cynicalkane 17y ago
          I agree with this. In fact, what scares me the most about the state of finance in the US is that, instead of well-meaning and meaningful reform, we have idiotic and impotent populist rage.
  • mortenjorck 17y ago
    Yes, Taibbi writes screeds and polemics. But he's also a hard-nosed investigative journalist, and while his writing is often darkly entertaining (I will always treasure his image of Goldman as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity"), his contribution to public awareness of kleptocracy is invaluable.
    • cynicalkane 17y ago
      Propaganda is rarely valuable, even when correct (which it isn't here).
      • binspace 17y ago
        Like "too big to fail"?
        • cynicalkane 17y ago
          ...that doesn't even fall into the category of "propaganda".
        • binspace 17y ago
          Seems like propaganda to me. That is the sound byte I associate with this whole mess. It was repeated quite often.
          • cynicalkane 17y ago
            Usually by the enemies of the banks, though. It's at best propaganda for the other side, if at all.
            • binspace 17y ago
              Well, the banks got what they wanted. A big fat payout and subsidies from the tax payers. We hedged their risks. They don't need any propaganda. Now before the decision was made...
            • 17y ago
  • euroclydon 17y ago
    This isn't about TARP money to me, it's about a textbook case a REGULATORY CAPTURE. Forget about To Big To Fail, we need to start asking who is To Big To Be Indited. Goldman doesn't seem to be engaged in risk, far from it, they have the power to shape markets to their advantage. Why do so many top level Goldman executives cycle in and out of powerful government positions?
  • ejames 17y ago
    I don't think it's very puzzling that a large, profitable institution can get dragged through the mud. There's a very simple reason: Many people don't accept that "being profitable" and "being worthy of admiration" are the same thing, or that Goldman's success as a business proves that they're a socially positive force. The Mafia was a successful, profitable large institution for a long time. People still thought they were crooks, because, well, they were. You can argue that Goldman Sachs is not comprised of a bunch of lying con men who made all of their money by cheating it from gullible rich old ladies. But "look how much money they made!" isn't a convincing reason in that argument. Maybe they're just very good at lying, cheating, and bribing their way to wealth! The people at the top of the pyramid scheme actually do make money, after all; it's everyone at the bottom who loses out.
    • cynicalkane 17y ago
      OK, but Goldman doesn't make money by pushing dope or breaking peoples' kneecaps. To reiterate: "The only people forced to trade with Goldman were taxpayers financing the bailouts, and you know what happened to them? They got all their money back plus twenty-three percent interest."
      • jbooth 17y ago
        No, but they do make a ton of money by frontrunning trades, a practice which is only legal because Congress is too dysfunctional to pass a law against it.
      • chaostheory 17y ago
        No, but they do it by putting a lot of their alumni into the US Dept of Treasury, which somehow miraculously gets them sweetheart deals from the gov. It's hard to admire a company that readily takes welfare handouts from the government, while at the same time asking for hands off when it comes to taxes and regulations, especially when mixed shady practices. GS is made of a lot of clever individuals, that's not questioned. Reputable and admirable? That's another story. Almost forgot, the banks haven't really paid up.: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/10-ways-say-no-banks-have-not-paid-back-their-debt-taxpayer http://www.zerohedge.com/article/10-ways-say-no-banks-have-n... There's another article that shows that the Fed Reserve opened up new loans to the banks to replace the 'paid up' TARP loans.
  • raheemm 17y ago
    GS is not being questioned for being fabulously profitable, but rather for the way they make their profits. (for eg. selling debt-instruments to clients and then turning back and shorting those same instruments) "It further puzzles me that it has become trendy to attack the financial market's most successful and profitable large institution. This proto-Marxist sentiment has no place in a free society." This is not a proto-marxist trend. The people are not questioning the profits of HP, Caterpillar, Exxon, IBM, etc. They are questioning institutions that placed stupid (and arguably fraudulent) bets, got the govt. to bail them out, and then went on to make even more money doing more shady deals (trading in life insurance, etc). These same banks are now resisting regulatory and reform efforts. "The only people forced to trade with Goldman were taxpayers financing the bailouts" Hank Paulson, the immediate-past CEO of GS, was the one who "forced" GS and other banks to take the money. Incidentally, he also allowed Lehman (a GS rival) to fail. All these actions might have been coincidental and without alterior motives. But you cannot blame a journalist from taking a deeper look, cos it sure does smell fishy.
  • infinite8s 17y ago
    Actually, the repayment only includes money that was directly loaned to Goldman. Everyone forgets about AIG, who paid their counterparties (which included GS) 100 cents on the dollar for what are probably worthless assets. Since AIG will likely never repay the full amount of its bailout, we as taxpayers effectively subsidized all the crappy bets taken by the major financial institutions.