Tag: Goldman Sachs

Politicians Won’t Stay Bought | Peter Mehit

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In a casual conversation someone quipped, “You know the real problem with politicians…they just won’t stay bought.” There was muted laughter. It’s too true to be funny.

Politician. The word has precise sound to it, as if your mayor had been called by God to run. As if people go into public service like it’s a ministry. For the good of all with pure, honorable intentions.  But the job is nothing like that. It’s a lot of arm twisting and ear bending by people all wanting you to do conflicting things. And in the end, nobody’s really happy with you. As Parker and Stone pointed out, the public sees you either as a ‘Giant Douche’ or a ‘Turd Sandwich’. Why would anyone want a such a shitty job?

Power.

Continue reading “Politicians Won’t Stay Bought | Peter Mehit” →

How Goldman gambled on starvation | Johann Hari – The Independent

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Goldman Sachs must die:

At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”

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Banks That Bundled Bad Debt Also Bet Against It | NYTimes.com

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Lewis Sachs, left and John Paulson, right

“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

Read on to find out how Goldman Sachs created and sold securities – they thought would lose money – to investors.

Back in the U.S.S.R.: The secret Paulson-Goldman meeting | Blogs | Reuters

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ThisUSSR Hank meeting took place between Hank Paulson, then Treasury Secretary and the Board of Goldman Sachs, in Moscow, in secret. This was two months before the collapse and subsequent bailout.

Goldman Sachs was a hugely powerful for-profit investment bank, and there he is, giving private chapter and verse on his opinions about the US and global economy, talking about internal Treasury matters, and previewing an upcoming (and surely market-moving) speech. All in secret, at a “social event” which somehow got kept off his official calendar.

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