—Goldman Sachs’ profits for the period were $3.19bn, a four-fold increase from the same period in 2008.—
They profited from the bailout not just from the money they were given but from the AIG money and mostly from friends in the right places.
By Michelle Fleury, BBC business reporter, New York
Goldman Sachs is the firm everyone loves to hate. There is a lot of anger towards the firm that took government money during the financial crisis and is now making so much cash.
Capturing the mood, a Rolling Stone magazine article published in June described Goldman as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”.
The news that the bank has more set aside for pay and bonuses in nine months than in the whole of last year will only fuel that anger. The compensation pot is on track to hit $23bn.
With bonuses overshadowing performance, the challenge for Goldman is fixing its image.
From Rolling Stone Magazine – The Great American Bubble Machine:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
“They did not receive just $10bn in government money – they received quite a bit more than that. $10 billion is the amount that they got under the Tarp program.“Goldman Sachs was the recipient of tens of billions of dollars more; a lot of that came through the bailout of AIG [a US bank] and a great deal of cheap government money that they were able to borrow through a variety of programmes by the US Federal Reserve.
“These programs allowed Goldman to borrow money for almost nothing. If you are just an ordinary person in the United States, you will notice that your money is not getting cheaper to borrow. All these banks are basically borrowing money for free from the US government, and lending it out to us at market rates.”
But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.
The Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, called old friends when they were planning the bail out. Three guesses who they were.
The interest the banks pay on savings is effectively zilch, but the interest we pay on our debt is skyrocketing.
Read the Rolling Stone article to better understand how the little guy is and is always going been screwed by the elite.
—It’s good to be the king, but it’s just as good to have him on speed dial.—
