Goldman CEO leaves a "peculiar voicemail message", page 1
Pages:
ATS Members have flagged this thread 3 times
Topic started on 23-2-2010 @ 11:18 PM by silent thunder
From Matt Taibbi:
Source:
www.rollingstone.com...

On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America's pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman's role in precipitating the global financial crisis.

The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses — meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a "bailout tax" on banks. Maybe this wasn't the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.

Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. "In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines," he said, "I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative."

Translation: We made a shI*+oad of money last year because we're so amazing at our jobs, so f*** all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.

Goldman wasn't alone. The nation's six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a gesture of self-sacrifice, Blankfein himself took a humiliatingly low bonus of $9 million, less than the 2009 pay of elephantine New York Knicks washout Eddy Curry. But in reality, not much had changed. "What is the state of our moral being when Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?" asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.



Your tax dollars at work, folks. Gotta love it:




reply posted on 24-2-2010 @ 01:57 AM by LordGoofus
If a company turns a decent profit despite bad markets, I have no problem with rewarding staff with larger bonuses (after all, they're responsible for the profits). What I do have a beef with though is the profit not being distributed equitably.

I work for one of the big players in investment banking, and the bonuses this year were ridiculously unbalanced. Despite having significantly less staff than last year, an additional $1B allocated to the bonus pool compared to last year, and turning a profit for the first time in roughly 2years, the bonuses recieved by pretty much all IT staff were at least 50% (or more) smaller than last year. At the same time, bonuses to senior execs were on par if not greater than last year.

I'm now seeing a very large percentage of IT workers looking for alternate employment (why stay when you can get $10-20k more for the same job, but with better hours somewhere else?). It'll be interesting to see how these top execs will make their money when all the good IT staff are gone and they're left with the underskillled cruft to keep the networks/applications/databases/workstations running. I'm already seeing severe skill shortages in a few teams due to the "pay them as little as possible, pat ourselves on the back about how smart we are and gorge on the profits" mentality. Don't be suprised if soon you start seeing articles about how businesses are finding it sooo hard to find skilled, motivated staff and being completely clueless as to why...


reply posted on 24-2-2010 @ 02:31 PM by silent thunder
Originally posted by GreenBicMan
Goldman has paid back the government the money they did not need in the first place with interest. Why is the media still so interested in how GS pays employees, or should I say this shill Matt Talibi and Rolling Stone? Those are better questions IMO.


The argument that Goldman paid back TARP money it didn't need so everything is fine and dandy is a very convenient, very transparent figleaf over a much larger, uglier truth.

Here's where the ugliness comes into play: The gov't buys AIG, which is a laughable company with a balance sheet resembling that of some Panamanian bank's Caymen account for Colombian Peso trade or something. It has hawked the family jewels long ago and has nothing exept its reptuation and a heck of a lot of shady derivatives insurance contracts like CDSs and much worse. Plus, its at the epicenter of all the investment banking and hedge-fund activity. So the governement starts pumping cash in there in the moronic attempt to "instil confidence."

AIG owes a LOT of money to a lot of people. Guess who gets to be the first in line, somehow, at the trough? I'll give you a hint: The name starts with GOLDMAN and ends in SACHS. Hmmm...what a remarkable coincidence? Meanwhile a bunch of other counterparites and AIG creditors are left twisting in the wind.

Picture it this way: The kindly old Doctor Uncle Sam sais poor old AIG needs a transfusion or is going to die. So you roll up your sleave, they jam an IV in there, and the bleed you to the brink of unconsciousness. Then they filter the fresh blood briefly through the corpse of AIG and out the other side into the gullet of Goldman Sachs. Mmm. Fresh taxpayer blood. Now, about those bonuses...

See how that works? Then, to add insult to injury the send you out into the waiting room to watch some clown like Cramer and his buxom cohost tell your how poor old Mr. Goldman Sachs is just so unfairly put upon and all this talk of taxpayer cash and vampirism is so uncalled for.. Oh and by the way its the nurse on the intercom. They might need another transmission of your lifeblood after all; think you could give another pint or two?



[edit on 2/24/10 by silent thunder]


reply posted on 24-2-2010 @ 05:58 PM by GreenBicMan
reply to post by silent thunder


Quite an interesting view, but not all entirely accurate IMO.

Still doesn't have anything to do with what GS pays their people for bonuses.


reply posted on 25-2-2010 @ 04:45 PM by silent thunder
Originally posted by GreenBicMan
reply to post by silent thunder


Quite an interesting view, but not all entirely accurate IMO.

Still doesn't have anything to do with what GS pays their people for bonuses.

What's innacurate about it? Nobody will contest the following; the facts are in the open. Do some googling or check the ole' Bloomberg if you need backup (sorry too lazy to give links, mea culpa).

1) AIG is functinally insolvent. It has been taken over by the government with taxpayer money.

2) Some people AIG owes money to are going to get or have gotten their contracts fulfilled. At less than peak market value, but a nozero "value" was assigned to what was at first a totally illiquid market. The illiquidity of that particular market was a direct function of free-market capitalism at its best and why not? Because nobody in their right minds wants to touch the toxic garbage and nobody should thus have to pay for it. In a real market economy the "price" would be zero.

3) Many many parties that AIG owes money to will never see a dime or will be paid back in some form of compensation that is essentially worthless.

4) Those that have actually gotten something out of AIG have been Goldman Sachs and a few other large firms. Those who will get screwed include small-to-medium shops, small hedge funds, various funds, people with invested savings, and granny's schoolteacher pension fund full of muni bonds and "safe triple-A-rated stuff from good old fashioned stable companies like AIG." Please excuse me while I surpress an evil giggle, having seen something like this coming down the pike for some time, but in truth I'd rather be wrong than right, just because a lot of stupid people trusted stupid inistitutions and didn't bother to do basic reasearch. On some level I know a lot of them were swaggering d-bags and deserve what they got. But I cannot put up with the idea of grandmothers eating catfood for 20 years because their funds and life savings got smooth-talked from under them.

5) Everything paid out of AIG post-bubble has gone to Goldman and a few other whales. And its all taxpayer money. 100%.

6) You are correct that Goldman didn't want the TARP money and could easily pay it back. It wasn't the only surly company that was unethusiastic about Paulson's TARP bailouts. Wells Fargo almost derailed the whole scheme. And it goes without saying that the public has never liked TARP. But guess what: the real money can be made by the survivors in much bigger ways: proprietary trading, bleeding the EU dry, you name it. How about pushing securities to your clients while shorting them at the same time? Goldman has done all that. Oh, and let's not forget our "all Goldman, all the time" Fed and Treasury staff. Funny how that kind of stuff just seems to "happen." This is going way over the line in a free market. And I'm not only implicating Goldman; you've got Citi -- and that's a whole other can of worms -- among others.

7) My point is that when Goldman feasts off the corpse of AIG in partuicular it is getting PUBLIC MONEY. TAXPAYER MONEY. This is just wrong. They need to take total losses on all failed AIG-related contracts. Haahahahaha like that will ever happen. In the meantime, it's like tapping the vein of the taxpayer and drinking public debt like blood.

[edit on 2/25/10 by silent thunder]
Pages:     ^^TOP^^



USDA Forces Whole Foods To Accept Monsanto
  Posted 7 days ago with 98 member flags
Greece wipes out Citizens Debt!! Tells Bankers to suck it
  Posted 8 days ago with 78 member flags
The Collapse of The American Dream Explained in Animation
  Posted 15 days ago with 53 member flags
Obama on the verge of a deal with the banks
  Posted 13 days ago with 23 member flags
EU financial dictatorship agreed to by EU ministers last night
  Posted 15 days ago with 17 member flags
Bankers requesting that Greece become their debt slaves
  Posted 11 days ago with 15 member flags