did they repay the billions funneled to them via Aig? Did they repay for the exclusivity of handling many of the transactions in the littany of gov finance programs wake up if the gov hadn't stepped in with the corporate welfare Goldman wouldve been in toilet where they belong instead it's gonna be a banner year and their competition got elimanted.
I'm just doing this for the fun of it. I will just mention Goldman Sachs in this post, see how long it will take asiaprop to jump on it. Counting...
I am not sure how often this needs to be repeated. Any penny paid by AIG -> Goldman was the result of contractual obligations. Thank whoever is responsible for having thrown billions at AIG. A boy on the top of the mountain throws a snow ball at his kindergarden buddy. The ball, however, misses and rolls down the mountain top, it forms a bigger and bigger ball, it turns into an avalanche and ultimately kills an old man. Wanna charge the kid with murder? So, here the answer for you and it aint pretty: 1) they dont have to because AIG owed tons of money to GS as well as others, all was contractual obligations 2) They handled a lot of stuff because they were better connected and were more able than ANY bank to advise on this matter with the level of experience. Anything wrong with connections? 3) They may have been one of the few brokers to survive without a single penny of support. Will I bet my farm on it? No, but I doubt you or anyone else would have bet the farm on the opposite possible outcome as well. But we will never know, so I dont see how you may possibly know. Come on buddy, you and every other GS hater should admit that fact is there was no time to start a huge auction process to figure out which bank was best suited to handle some of this mess. Of course does the chosen bank profit, no question. But it has not always been GS. Remember the BS debacle, JPM profited nicely, remember the day of Lehman, when another bank entered into exclusive employee negotiations and no other bank could bid for its employees. Remember LTCM, when only a handful banks were called for an "emergency meeting", and it was not GS that was called first. You dont seem to be having any ethical issues whatsoever when GM or GE were awarded huge covernment contracts in China years ago while other bidders were turned down. Turns out relationship were the deciding factor. So are relationships a factor in pretty much every other business setting. I remember the public (yes, guys such as you) was screaming for government bailout support on the day Lehman went down and the weeks after in their short-sighted belief this will prop up equity markets. It was a chaotic time and of course had time been plenty things could have been done a lot more orderly. I was against the bailout altogether. I am a free market proponent. Market fources should have washed out the dirt and let those survive which were able to survive. But I find it ridiculous to single out GS as the sole benefactor while everyone else was treated like shit? Thats pathetic. Call me a racist, but take a look at some of the black congressmen and women who threw themselves on GS the first day they heard the GS CEO was talking to Gaithner and GS was here and there. Those people could hardly pronounce the English language correctly nor could they spell correctly (forgive me, at least I can claim I am not a native speaker, nor am I an elected politician) but yet they seemed to know precisely the wrongs of GS, laughable. Fact is in its rather long history GS has done more things correctly than any other financial institution, it has sent more people than any other bank into high level education and political positions and most can be attributed to experience and skill. Your whole point is whether GS now abuses its power and connections to its own exclusive benefit. Well, I will only say this: You need to be an extreme conspiracy theorist and at very bad terms with your own country and its elected leaders in order to claim GS is in effect running the Fed and other institutions. If you really believe this then you have a lot of other things to worry about than GS negatively interfering with your trading, lol!!!
I don't particularly disagree with the points you are making. We all know business is a mix of who and what you know, with a little dose of what you do, but there is something that seems to be at the core of every debate about GS recently. It is how they benefited of government's bailout of AIG. You say AIG had contractual obligations, and that is correct, but, and this has been repeated into oblivion, and still, you seem to ignore that, in fact, there will be no contract at all if AIG would have gone bankrupt, the way it should have, and it's hard not to see government's bailout as a favor to GS and other big banks, that otherwise would have lost big time. It wasn't the government's obligation to enforce the contracts between AIG and other third parties - it could have ended up in court at the best. Now you answer me if this bailout does not stink from a mile.
my simple answer is: No, it does not stink. The bailout was for AIG. The problem was that letting AIG down would have had huge effects on the rest of the economy. Nobody at that time thought about how much money AIG would use to repay bank x or y. My point all along is that if government wanted to benefit banks they would have done so directly not through AIG. Funds for AIG were to save AIG because its creditors otherwise would have taken the last pen and paper out of the firm. If American politicians were really that stupid to believe the benefits are larger by infusing cash into AIG IN ORDER to have banks benefit from it rather than going the direct route then it cannot be helped. But it does not make any sense whatsoever to argue the government wanted to benefit GS and others by pouring money into AIG. The argument just does not hold at all to claim so.
You mean "systemic risk" - that letting AIG fail would have caused ripple effects that would cause the big banks to fail? Maybe those banks should have sued AIG/Joe Cassano for it, or just had to suck it up, since they didn't do enough due diligence to made sure that their insurer could pay off.
OK, I am just going to say this and I will stop, as I don't want to polimicize with you: Maybe GS and the other AIG third parties didn't want a direct infusion of money, because they will have to repay it. By taking the AIG route (which at the time was bankrupt, and in no position to respect the contracts it had) GS ended up with the money, but it's AIG who will have to pay it back - if ever.