The Great American Bubble Machine (Goldman Sachs)

Rolling Stone ^ | July 13, 2009 | MATT TAIBBI

[Nipfan]

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

[Nipfan]

This is a fascinating and ultimately disheartening story. It lists and explains the great bubbles of the past century and predicts the next one - climate change and the carbon credit market.

It must not be allowed to happen.

[kittymyrib]

Goldman Sachs: Enemy of America...and too big and well-connected politically to prosecute

[Daisyjane69]

I’ve heard that this is a very good piece. Thanks for posting it. I hadn’t found the time to dig for it, but you saved me the trouble!

[SpaceBar]

Michael Savage mentioned this article in detail a week or two ago. Some pretty scary information about the far reaching tentacles of Goldman-Sachs contained within.

[Earthdweller]

One thing GS didn't count on when they took out so much of their competition, they are one of the few left to shine the spotlight on.

[KTM rider]

I heard 4 more "mom and pop" banks closed up shop today, isn't it about 4 per week

how many small bank failures are we up to now ?

as the statists continue to consolidate and conquer, devouring every last drop of capitalism

[kitkat]

Rolling Stone?

[rbg81]

On occasion, RS does come out with some outstanding articles. This is definitely one.

I’ve heard types like Glenn Beck rail against Goldman Sachs for some time. When this stuff starts coming out of the relatively (liberal) MSM, the sh!t is really starting to hit the fan. Even CNBC is starting to talk about how GS owns the US Treasury Dept.

Nice touch at the end about the coming Global Warming bubble. It illustrates what I’ve been saying for a long time—that GW is just a big wealth transfer mechanism. And, unlike some of these previous bubbles, there is nothing of value behind it: not tech, not real estate, NOTHING.

[kitkat]

***It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn’t know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman’s later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry’s standards of quality control.***

I am not very knowledgeable about investing, but some sixth sense has continuously told me NOT to buy whatever a bank tries to sell me, other than fixed-rate CDs. The above paragraph convinces me that banks should never have been allowed to sell investments.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private taxcollection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

Earlier Rolling stone had an abridged version of this article on its website. I think this is the complete text.

[Daisyjane69]

This was an excellent article. Everyone on my email list got a link to it. I hope each and every FReeper takes 20-30 minutes to read it. (btw, one other thing. Gary Gensler is also from GS. He is now the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The precious metals community is expecting the manipulation to be dealt with, come this fall.) What would be interesting to find out, is if GS is holding long or short in silver. As this article reveals, they make SURE that they win.

[hennie pennie]

Don’t miss this.

[hennie pennie]

*ping*

note: this article was posted several times

[hennie pennie]

Another posting of the same article.

[hennie pennie]

bttt