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As the U.S. housing market began its epic fall nearly three years ago, top executives at Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs cheered the large financial gains the firm stood to make on certain bets it had placed, according to newly released documents.
Goldman executive Donald Mullen predicted a windfall because credit-rating companies had downgraded mortgage-related investments, which caused losses for investors.
"Sounds like we will make some serious money," Mullen wrote.
In one of the e-mails obtained by the committee, Goldman's chief financial officer, David A. Viniar, responded to a report that the firm earned $50 million in one day with "short" positions, or bets that the housing market would decline. "Tells you what might be happening to people who don't have the big short," Viniar wrote to his colleagues.
Just a little over one year after being elected as a junior senator, in 2006 Obama was the featured guest before a private gathering of the Goldman Sachs executives in Chicago, an honor unheard of for someone that politically insignificant, speaking before the most powerful financial firm on Wall Street and one of the most powerful in the world. This was quietly reported in Bloomberg News.
It was the launch of his presidential campaign and Goldman executives soon gave over $800,000 to jump start the Obama presidential bid along with collecting millions of dollars from their fellow Wall Street firms and clients. Oh yes, Robert Rubin became the Obama economic expert, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs.
www.bignews.biz...
The story only gets better. On May 3, 2007, Barack Obama attended an event at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan that was not on his public schedule and is only now surfacing. The exclusive private dinner was for Goldman Sachs traders and featured a discussion on issues by Obama moderated for the Wall Street firm by NBC's Tom Brokaw. Once again the circumstances are strange as a year later Brokaw would be moderating the second presidential debate between Obama and McCain and the economy and Wall Street were the main points of discussion. Of course the debate commission and McCain were unaware that Obama and Brokaw had already held a practice session the year earlier.
www.bignews.biz...
The most successful of the private platforms was InterContinental Exchange, or ICE, founded by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and a few other big brokerages in 2000. ICE soon opened a trading platform in London, allowing its founders to trade vast quantities of U.S. oil overseas without being subject to regulation. This opened the floodgates to oil price speculation.
Do we really know anything about the long term relationship between Obama and Goldman Sachs other than their massive fund raising for him? Since he has been secretly guided and financed by Goldman people from the very beginning of his presidential campaign were they influential in his economic platform? Obama never questioned the role of Goldman in the sub-prime fiasco nor in manipulating the oil futures prices. When Goldman specialists tried to drive the price of oil up to $200 a barrel this year Obama never said a word.
Long before this time the Goldman Sachs Foundation had quietly channeled funds to Colin Powell's new group, America's Promise and Powell himself was collecting honorariums from $50,000 to $100,000 for speaking to various groups including Goldman sponsored events. At some point between the time he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then left government, only to come back as Bush Secretary of State, Powell acquired between $1 million and $5 million of stock in giant defense contractor General Dynamics, a firm in which the Roshschilds have extensive ownership. Powell eventually would be converted from a McCain financial contributor and friend to endorser of Obama in less than a year.
Although they compete with firms like Goldman they also cooperate often on international mergers and acquisitions, have been partners in the oil futures exchange, and recently both sought to expand their influence in Asia with the Rothschilds selling a 20% interest in one of their companies to the Bank of China. The Shanghai and Hong Kong-listed commercial bank will pay $341 million for the stake in the French arm of the La Compagnie Financière. It is the first strategic investment by a leading Chinese bank in the eurozone.
$994,795 in Goldman Sachs campaign cash that Obama bagged. The class-warfare Dems are also mum on all the president’s Goldman Sachs men sitting in the catbird seat:
Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission head.
Former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson serves under Geithner as his top deputy and overseer of TARP bailout — $10 billion of which went to Goldman Sachs. Left-leaning government watchdog Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington responded: “It makes it appear that they are saying one thing and doing another.” Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation noted that, while at Goldman Sachs, Patterson lobbied against the executive-pay limits that Obama had crusaded for as senator (this was, of course, before his administration carved out exemptions for AIG). While Patterson agreed to recuse himself on any Goldman Sachs–related issues or policy concerns, Blumenthal wrote, it “still creates a serious conflict for Geithner, as Treasury is being partly managed by a former Goldman lobbyist. Geithner is also placed in a tough position considering that his chief of staff is limited in the areas in which he can work (supposedly).”
Obama’s close hometown crony, campaign-finance chief and senior adviser Penny Pritzker, was head of Superior Bank of Chicago, a subprime specialist that went bust in 2001, leaving more than 1,400 people stripped of their savings after bank officials falsified profit reports. Pritzker’s lawyer at O’Melveny and Myers, Tom Donilon, is now Obama’s deputy national-security adviser. He earned just shy of $4 million representing her and other high-profile meltdown clients including Goldman Sachs.
The SEC charges against Goldman Sachs are a ruse, a ploy, and a smokescreen to get the Dodd financial reform passed,” he said. The bill, he argues, fails to hold the multibillion dollar hedge fund short sellers accountable for their illegal market manipulations. One of these short sellers, not named in the Goldman suit, is billionaire George Soros, known as the man who “broke the Bank of England” by betting against the British pound and who was convicted of insider trading in France.
The firms of Soros and Paulson are key players in the MFA.
As AIM reported back in January of 2008, Paulson, who had already made billions of dollars betting that the housing market would collapse, had met with George Soros about using various “financial instruments” against the U.S. economy.
We warned at the time: “The American people should be quickly educated by our media on how very rich people like Paulson and Soros make ‘bets’ on the rise or fall of national currencies and economies. Paulson is now telling investors ‘it’s still not too late’ to bet on more economic problems. These are capitalists who seem to have a vested interest in the further decline of the U.S. economy.”
Soros refused to talk about his meeting with Paulson, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In terms of the case against Goldman, Diamond predicts the result will be a financial fine and the firing of a Goldman vice president, who will then turn up working for a member of the MFA.
Diamond says the embarrassment to Goldman Sachs from the charges is a small price for the MFA to pay in order to get the financial reform bill passed,
“which will cover their role in engineering the economic collapse, exonerate them from culpability, distort history in their favor, and put all the publicly traded companies under their potential control.”
The American people must be made to understand that the
Managed Funds Association is “the secret government within the Obama administration,” Diamond argues. “
They had to give an example of bad behavior on Wall Street as a compelling reason to quickly pass the Dodd financial reform bill, but since they could not find any example from the ‘good Wall Street,’ who are the victims of their crimes, they had to use one of their own. The case, however, is deliberately designed to be weak by letting the big fish off the hook.”
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles -- the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality -- were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.
Revised, updated, and featuring a new after, word by the author, this special twentieth anniversary edition continues Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.
Originally posted by woodwardjnr
It's good to see that people are now realising the financial collapse was not some, huge mistake or act of God, but a calculated fraud. Will those behind it be brought to justice? And, what sort of punishment should they expect?
Originally posted by ModernAcademia
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How will this company stay in business?
Clinton and Bush has goldman execs hold seats in treasury
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Goldman Was with obama from the get-go!
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So Goldman is behind oil speculation too?
Is this something everyone knew and only I didn't?
Common knowledge??
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Money is god and in god we trust!
Right??
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You do not elect presidents, you elect money!
Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
History keeps repeating, and repeating, and repeating.
For those interesting in how events such as this just seem to keep happening over and over again, I highly recommend the following book: A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Contemporaries who are mindful of "conspiracies" and the historical events influencing such, including this predictable outcome, should be fluent in the content of this book.