Crap Game @ Goldman Sachs anyone?

Do you want to invest your hard earned money in a Crap Game ? Sometimes I feel
that the odds of an average person making big money on Wall Street are worse
than gambling at the Crap table. I know that America voted for "Change", but I
don't think they were referring to what is left in their pockets after the
latest "Stimulus". I received an e-mail from my Brother-in-law (a former
Option's Floor Trader) about an article that was written by Matt Taibbi. It was
very enlightening and I thought I would recommend it to the Yahootrader Group .


From Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" in Rolling Stone Issue
1082-83.


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.


Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in
influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like
trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture:
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain
— an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic
capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free
markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized
democracy.


They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is
relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative
bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums
from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and
corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative
pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust,
leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire
process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money
at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart
guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and
over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what
may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.


The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially
illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas
scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs,
hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks
like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story
windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if
you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.


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. By now, most of us know the major
players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry
Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to
funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street.
Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at
Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion
taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill
Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was
imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout
from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue
Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia,
scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute
payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief
of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of
staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former
Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG,
which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of
the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the
World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of
overseeing Goldman.

For more :
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_ma\
chine/1