amen. GS 1) repaid TARP therefore owes NOTHING directly to the government 2) received every single penny from AIG and other companies because of contractual obligations NOT because of any connections. 3) is not a non-for-profit-company and therefore has no obligation whatsoever to please the average American consumer Is GS better than anybody else at what they are doing? Heck yes!!! Do they play by the rules? Yes, otherwise go and sue them. Do they use relationships in government, academia, the corporate world? YES!!! Like every other company who is connected. So what now?
the taxpayer did take a lot of risk, willingly and by choice for decades. The average American lived beyond his means through consumption and over-leverage in the mortgage market. So, why the heck should the taxpayer not foot the bill when things burn partly as a result of such irresponsible risk??? GS is not the one who wrote the check. It was your elected government. Write to them, bitch about them but you will NEVER change this truth. Whatever you say... fact is a bunch of to GS unrelated congressmen and senators got together and decided to pump billions of dollars into dead beat companies. GS was not one of the dead beats as you can see by the full and completed repayment. What besides envy and pure hatred is your issue with GS? REALLY....
And you seem to willfully ignore the lobbying GS did to keep AIG from declaring bankruptcy which would have vaporized GS's balance sheet when they couldn't collect the billions AIG owed them. Which, by the way, they did collect, compliments of the US taxpayer. GS has and still is making huge bucks sucking off the gov't teat through cheap money and implicit "too big to fail" guarantees. There's no way around this fact. If I could just keep doubling down until either a) I make money or b) the gov't bails me out (which they would have done if GS had been teetering) I can make enormous cash too. I guess you could call this good risk management as they seem to have no risk! Any thought that they were good risk managers went away as soon as they willingly converted to a bank holding company to access liquidity. As Paul Volcker correctly pointed out, GS is a regulated bank now. When do we start making them act like a bank? [edit] I see from the post above, they are now an FHC instead of BHC. My, how convenient. I'm sure they'll convert back if things get hairy again.
LOL. Paulson was the ex-CEO of Goldman, with over 200 million in GS options. No conflict there...I'm sure he was willing to let GS shares fall to $0. Surely Paulson acted on the up and up when he decided "no tickie, no laundry" for Bear Stearns...
If they made a bad enough move they wouldn't still be around: they would never get too big to fail" because they would have blown out long ago.
How do you figure? The fact remains they paid the money back they were allowed to, with interest, and want to pay everything else back, with interest, but the govt. won't let them yet. You can say bullshit all you want but it doesn't change the facts.
YESSSS!!!!! THE US GOVT FORCED ALL INVESTMENT BANKS TO BECOME COMMERCIAL BANKS LAST YEAR THEN FORCED THEM ALL TO TAKE VARIOUS TARP AMOUNTS. Seriously, this was ALL OVER the news late last year. You had to be in a hole not to have seen it. At the very least you shouldn't be spouting off if you only have 10% of the information....
lobbying or not, there is always 2 sides to the story. As the one in power you have a choice to allow lobby groups to influence your judgment or to do the right things for the next couple generations. This is how corporate America worked for decades and mostly not even in finance. Everybody was happy. I think the real issue at heart is not some banks, its some really stupid and irresponsible politicians and law makers who wasted billions of dollars in companies they understood nothing about. They made the final decision, no GS in the world had the power to sign the check.
so, no exCEO should ever be allowed to enter office? Buddy, you cannot blame the guy who gets hired just because government did not screen his financial interests before or because there were no rules in place to remove such conflicts of interest. Why is it that guy's fault? The rest of your post is wild conspiracy theories and no need to comment on.
They did make a bad move - they got into a counterparty arrangement with AIG. And if the government hadn't acted to bail out the whole system a year ago, GS would have gone down with everyone else. GS does not exist by itself as an entity, it is just a vehicle being used by powerful people to further their own personal interests, in this case getting rich at everyone else's expense (and risk). It's legalized theft, and has nothing to do with a free and fair market system, which probably never existed in the first place. Anyone who believes that the success of these firms has anything to do with a fair market or a level playing field needs to have their head examined. GS has been on the inside from Day 1, and what they have been doing goes back to the early part of the 20th century. For that matter, the entire financial and banking system was designed from the ground up to screw the average person and transfer wealth from the masses to the hands of the privileged few. In the old days the nobles just took what they wanted directly from the peasants, but these days they have to use firms like GS and others. In any case, none of this matters, and complaining about it is entirely pointless. Powerful people have always corrupted the system to their advantage in every civilization since the beginning of time, and ours is no different. At least we still live in a society where as an individual you can make your own way and rise above the corporate slavery that ensnares most, if you have the skills.