"The Greatest Non-Apology of All Time" - Or: Why I Love Matt Taibbi

The arrogance of Goldman Sachs during this entire debacle is outrageous:

trueslant.com...

“While we regret that we participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice, we are proud of the way our firm managed the risk it assumed on behalf of our client before and during the financial crisis,” he said. Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman Goldman Sachs

So wait...the crisis is over!!?? Has he not read the tea leaves in the bond market? Oh well, his retirement is likely still rock solid and his house is probably still worth something.

I swear Goldman's statement sounds more like when you break up with someone right after you have sex. Not that I would know anything about that...I'm just saying.


Matt Taiibi's response - he's just calling it like he sees it:

First of all, generally speaking, when one apologizes for having done a bad thing (like for instance destroying the world economy), it is good form to wait at least until the end of the sentence to start bragging again.

Second of all, what is particularly obnoxious about this phrase is that Goldman is bragging about the fact that it actually made money while it was pumping the economy full of explosive leverage. While companies like Lehman and Bear were dumb enough to actually eat their own rat meat, Goldman knew what it was doing and was careful to bet against the same stuff it was selling, which makes its behavior many times worse than that of other banks, not better. I get into this more in a Rolling Stone piece coming out next week, but Goldman’s continual bragging about its mortgage hedges is one of the more obnoxious phenomena in the recent history of Wall Street, given that it was selling this # by the ton during that same period.

Beyond that, Goldman’s “risk management” also involved buying massive hedges on its mortgage exposure from…drum roll please… AIG. In fact Goldman was AIGFP’s single largest customer; while the bank was busy flooding the world financial system with doomed mortgages, it was also busy piling bets on the back of the insurance behemoth — $20 billion worth, to be exact. And AIG’s death spiral was triggered not so much by its bets going sour, but by companies like Goldman that demanded that AIG put up cash to show its ability to pay. These collateral calls were what killed AIG last September, and Goldman was one of those creditors pulling the trigger: what makes this fact even more obnoxious is that ex-Goldmanite Henry Paulson then stepped in and green-lighted an $80 billion taxpayer bailout. Ultimately another ex-Goldmanite named Ed Liddy was put in charge of AIG, and Goldman ended up getting paid 100 cents on the dollar for its AIG debt.

So basically Goldman helped kill AIG, necessitating a federal bailout, after which time it got paid off handsomely for bets that it certainly would not have been paid off completely for had AIG simply been liquidated. And again, AIG probably does not have a market to sell its CDS insurance to firms like Goldman, if firms like Goldman had not cooked up this insane scheme to underwrite billions upon billions of toxic debt and sell it off to secondary buyers as safe investments. Moreover AIG would not have even had this business of selling CDS insurance had not a bunch of ex-Goldman guys, in particular Bob Rubin, quietly pushed to deregulate the derivatives market back at the end of the Clinton administration.

So when Goldman says it is proud that it “managed the risk” for its clients, what it’s really saying is, “We’re proud that we kept the extreme crapness of our mortgage securities secret from everyone but our clients, and fobbed off the nightmare leverage they created on dumbass AIG and all the pensioners and teachers and other idiots who bought this stuff. Go [snip] yourselves and suck on our yachts.”

The best part is his McDonald's analogy, you gotta read it...


[edit on 18-6-2009 by Sergeant Stiletto]

reply to post by Sergeant Stiletto


Nice article, I love the Layman's terms.

To be fair, AIG killed it's self..

When you sell an insurance policy to 10 parties for one debt package... you should, at some point, expect someone to need a payout......

I don't know, perhaps my logical thinking has no place in the financial world.. Well.. no, I know my logical thinking has no place in the financial world, because if it did there would be no such thing as CDO's and CDS's.

Anyways.

Goldman Sachs..

This is me giving you the finger.

It's sad to know Goldman Sachs essentially controls this administration, just as it controlled the last... *sigh* ...

We are ruled by cowards and thieves..

I dont do threads - so can someone post this article - gobsmacked.

trueslant.com...

from your link:

So what’s wrong with Goldman posting $3.44 billion in second-quarter profits, what’s wrong with the company so far earmarking $11.4 billion in compensation for its employees? What’s wrong is that this is not free-market earnings but an almost pure state subsidy.

Last year, when Hank Paulson told us all that the planet would explode if we didn’t fork over a gazillion dollars to Wall Street immediately, the entire rationale not only for TARP but for the whole galaxy of lesser-known state crutches and safety nets quietly ushered in later on was that Wall Street, once rescued, would pump money back into the economy, create jobs, and initiate a widespread recovery. This, we were told, was the reason we needed to pilfer massive amounts of middle-class tax revenue and hand it over to the same guys who had just blown up the financial world. We’d save their asses, they’d save ours. That was the deal.

It turned out not to happen that way. We constructed this massive bailout infrastructure, and instead of pumping that free money back into the economy, the banks instead simply hoarded it and ate it on the spot, converting it into bonuses. So what does this Goldman profit number mean? This is the final evidence that the bailouts were a political decision to use the power of the state to redirect society’s resources upward, on a grand scale. It was a selective rescue of a small group of chortling jerks who must be laughing all the way to the Hamptons every weekend about how they fleeced all of us at the very moment the game should have been up for all of them.

He's a true patriot.

undertheradarmedia.wordpress.com...

Popular Rolling Stone contributor, writer and blogger Matt Taibbi claims that he was sent e-mails which attacked him and accused him of anti-Semitism for exposing the investment bank giant Goldman’s Sachs and their shady financial dealings over the years...

...The charges of anti-Semitism laid on Matt Taibbi for simply following the money should lead to many debates on how the Anti-Defamation League sponsored hate crime and cyberbullying laws have on journalism should they be signed into law.

What an outrage. No one can dispute Taibbi's sharp analysis of Goldman Sachs and I'm sure it threatens the power elite that Taibbi is able to break it down in ways anyone can understand.

Anti-Semitism!!?? You gotta be effing kidding me!! How absurd. More like anti-fascism - the merging of Corporations and Government.

The most effective way to shut down the opposition is to discredit it. The accusation doesn't have to be true, just cast a doubt and repeat it over and over again and in the minds of people unaware of the media manipulation it will have the same affect as a direct attack.

I hope Matt uses his excellent journalistic skills to tear into this antiquated tactic of character assassination and media manipulation and above all I hope he takes on the ADL and it's growing role in partnering with the government to define hate and extremism in a way that silences dissent and opposition.

related

[edit on 18-7-2009 by Sergeant Stiletto]