Goldman Fueled AIG Gambles

Wall Street Journal ^ | 12/12/09 | SERENA NG and CARRICK MOLLENKAMP

[jimbo123]

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. played a bigger role than has been publicly disclosed in fueling the mortgage bets that nearly felled American Insurance Group Inc.

Goldman was one of 16 banks paid off when the U.S. government last year spent billions closing out soured trades that AIG made with the financial firms. A Wall Street Journal analysis of AIG's trades, which were on pools of mortgage debt, shows that Goldman was a key player in many of them, even the ones involving other banks.

Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of U.S. mortgage assets that AIG insured during the housing boom. That is roughly twice as much as Société Générale and Merrill Lynch, the banks with the biggest exposure to AIG after Goldman, according an analysis of ratings-firm reports and an internal AIG document that details several financial firms' roles in the transactions.

[stephenjohnbanker]

Goldman is what it has always been.....gangsters with a Harvard or Wharton MBA.

[GoDuke]

Well obviously the only way to stop this from happening again is to give Goldman Sachs more money.

[Chunga85]

If this were a game the score would be:

Wall Street $25 Trillion - Main Street $0

As a prize for winning the game they take everyone’s homes.

Every taxpayer in this country needs to watch this video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ6lPaiKmwg&feature=related

[Travis McGee]

"The logic of the conspiracy theorists in this regard is, of course, impeccable: Goldman alumnus Josh Bolten runs the White House, while his former boss, Hank Paulson, runs the Treasury. They both speak regularly to former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, now over at Citigroup, who ran Goldman before Paulson and who keeps Paulson and Bolton dangling like puppets on a string. They all supposedly touch base with the heads of the Italian and Canadian central banks—both Goldman alumni—and with Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, ex Goldman. What's more Paulson is now getting his advice on how to handle the crisis from Ken Wilson, the recently retired Goldman partner and financial-institutions M&A banker, who Paulson just recruited to Washington to help him out. Already at Treasury were Goldman alumni Dan Jester, Anthony Ryan, David Nason and Bob Hoyt, the department's general counsel. And—the conspiracy crowd can't help but point out—Neel Kashkari, 35, a former vice-president at Goldman who Paulson recruited as assistant secretary of international affairs in 2006, has just been appointed—by Paulson—to run, on an interim basis, the new $700 billion bailout fund."

~~William Cohan, "Does Goldman Sachs Really Rule the World?" October 2008

[FromLori]

lol put the wrong response in the other thread meant to be in this one

Barack Obama Ensures a Long Depression

http://mises.org/daily/3907

[FromLori]

Mises Not the only warning of our collapse either

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/joyce-warns-of-us-armageddon-20091211-kmlu.html

http://dailyreckoning.com/the-on-again-off-again-depression/

http://www.thedailybell.com/645/Recession-for-a-Whopping-20-Years.html

[stephenjohnbanker]

One would have to be financially illiterate, or just plain obtuse not to see what has, and is going on here.

[stephenjohnbanker]

“The banks have no incentive whatsoever to gamble their free money by lending it to risky borrowers like the overleveraged American people. What this represents is a massive wealth transfer from the public to the financiers, who prop up the government itself by underwriting and making markets in its debt.”

I’m certain you both know this.

Obama is doing everything humanly possible to destroy our economy.

[Chunga85]

Main Street - let’s stop pointing fingers at each other.

Learn how to fight back!

http://livinglies.wordpress.com/

[Chunga85]

I might be debating myself here but....We all seem to have forgotten that the very words “mort” and “gage” in French mean “death gamble”.

If the borrower died first, the debt is due on death, which is usually what happens.

Once in a while, the lenders all die enmasse, and the borrowers win the “death gamble”. What’s fair for the one is fair for the other. Just let the laws of economics take their course.

[Lurker]

"There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." - Ludwig von Mises

[Carling]

Plus Timmy Geithner’s gravy train.

The sheeple will never know this, however.

[Eric Blair 2084]

The AIG “bailout” was not a bailout of AIG it was a bailout of Paulson and his crony capitalist good ole boy friends at Goldman Sachs.

I’m a greedy Wall St. evil man myself. I am not a fan of the you betcha Sarah Palin school of conservatism.

But when you are right, you are right.

AIG owed Goldman Sachs billions for the credit default swaps...unregulated insurance products sold to protect the greedy firms from losses on home loans they were forced to make to homeless unemployed people under the Community Reinvestment Act to people who had no chance of paying it back. All in the name of social justice.

Of course, when the whole house of cards came crashing down Barney “The buggering gay Bolshevik” Frank blames capitalism for the sticky mess.

It’s a little more complicated than that. If any FReeper has any questions I will be happy to explain it to you honestly.

[piasa]

Goldman-Sachs trivia from an old Gore War snippet on Greg Simon...

* Greg Simon : Greg Simon, former chief domestic policy advisor to Vice President Gore and president of Simon Strategies, a strategic planning and public affairs consulting firm.

DEMOCRATS.COM - THE GORE CAMPAIGN CONNECTION: "http://community.democrats.com/members/simon/ "- notes that [Greg] Simon was an "informal" adviser to the Gore campaign.

But elsewhere Simon's role is suggested to be a little more than simply an informal advisor...

"With a full recount in Miami-Dade, said Gore senior adviser Greg Simon, "we would easily have a net gain to win the election." - Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60380-2000Nov26.html

"The decision was certainly right for some of Gore's biggest benefactors, which quickly cashed in on what turned out to be a $75 million bonanza. Wall Street firms such as Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter & Company; Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.; and Goldman Sachs & Co., Gore’s No. 3 career patron, collectively raked in at least $42 million in underwriting fees.
Well-connected law firms, among them Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Patton, Boggs, earned nearly $11 million for their part in taking the company private.
USEC retained J.P. Morgan & Company, Inc., as its adviser in the deal; J.P. Morgan, in turn, hired Greg Simon, Gore's domestic policy adviser, for a fee of $10,000 a month to help it select the new, privatized company's directors. "

Simon was more than just an informal campaign advisor - he was an insider in the middle of the decision to retract the concession! Yet at the same time he was associated with an "independent" website that was promoting litigation in Florida AND collecting donations to do so during the election aftermath.

Note again that [David?] Lytel registered www.trustthepeople.com on 11/8 before it was known that the recount battle would go on for months.
~ freeper GOPactivist

*********************

Top 20 contributors to Obama's campaign include:

Goldman Sachs $994,795
Citigroup $699,790 [piasa notes : see NEMAZEE {see IRAN}]
JPMorganChase $695,132
UBS AG $543,219
Morgan Stanley $514,881
----- Proud_USA_Republican to Redgirl Monday, July 20, 2009 11:45:20 PM · 32 of 32; ON THE THREAD "Obama hits out at Wall Street banks"

[piasa]

Few more tidbits for the woodpile:

------ Jon Corzine and Hot Air - Perfect Together, http://blog.newyorkcitycommunity.us/2008/09/20/jon-corzine-and-hot-air—perfect-together.aspx The Jersey Guys on NJ101.5 was talking about Gov. Jon Corzine. Corzine is working Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign. Word is Corzine is promised a high level position in the Treasury in an Obama Presidency. Corzine was former CEO of Goldman Sachs. The Jersey Guy’s said that Corzine told Merrill Lynch and his Wall Street buddies that this financial crash will be fixed in an Obama admnistration. No details on how though. Merrill Lynch has offices in NJ and it seems they are very worried.

Maurice Strong is involved with Chicago’s Climate Exchange. Al Gore is chairman of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management. That firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. Generation Investment Management purchases carbon dioxide offsets. The co-founder of Generation Investment Management is former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who is currently the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Goldman Sachs bought 10% of Chicago’s Climate Exchange shares for $23 million. Chicago’s Climate Exchange owns half of the European Climate Exchange, Europe’s largest carbon trading company.

Maurice Strong: Chicago Climate Exchange’s board member. Canadian Maurice Strong has made a career and a fortune out of financial rip-offs. Strong served on the board of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (World Conservation Union) and was an advisor to the UN’s Kofi Annan. Among many other things, he was the first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program in the 1970’s and Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit.

Goldman Sachs: The largest shareholder of the Chicago Climate Exchange and the second largest shareholder of the InterContinental Exchange. In fact, Goldman Sachs put Al Gore into the carbon offset hedge fund business in 2003 when David Blood, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs Assets Management, along with two other former Goldman Sachs officers, helped Gore establish his firm, General Investment Management, which focuses on “Sustainable Investing” by peddling carbon offsets.

Jon Corzine: He is now the Governor of NJ. He retired from Goldman Sachs in 1999 after taking the firm public and receiving at least $320 million worth of its stock. He ran for the Senate in New Jersey in 2000, spending more than $60 million of his fortune to win the seat. The bubble of high-priced technology stocks began to burst in March 2000. In August 2000, the SEC issued a warning against aftermarket sales, also known as “laddering.” “I’ve never even heard the term ‘laddering’ before,” Corzine said. However, Nicholas Maier of Cramer & Co. said it happened on Corzine’s watch. “For Corzine not to know of a common practice being utilized to generate and manipulate stock prices would be surprising,” Mr. Maier said. “He was obviously there during this time. I definitively saw his company engaged in illegal activity. They (the SEC) expressed to me that laddering is a trickier thing [to prove],” Maier said. “I will say it. They did it. They laddered. Whether the SEC can construct a case is a different story.”

Al Gore: Owns a carbon trading business, Generation Investment Management. They were banked with the Lehman Bros. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist.

Merrill Lynch: Deeply involved in the Carbon trading business. They are a founding member and primary sponsor of the U.K.-based Carbon Disclosure Project. Merrill Lynch is headed by John A Thain who is a Goldman Sachs alumni.

Lehman Brothers: Created a propaganda piece last year about climate change to make their investors keep getting high profits from the Kyoto carbon trade scheme and the support of huge public subventions. All that, of course, with the applause of the usual choir of politicians, the entire media and the Greens.
A year ago they couldn’t predict their bankruptcy but were predicting the climate 100 years ahead. Thousands of green militants have been using the Lehman report as a proof of global warming and impending chaos. The report is the basis for policies on climate change in Spain, Argentina and several other countries playing the progress game.

Chicago Climate Exchange: The Exchange owes it existence in part to the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago-based liberal foundation philanthropy that provided $347,000 in grant support in 2000 for a preliminary study to test the viability of a market in carbon credits. On the CCX board of directors is the ubiquitous Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist and diplomat who since the 1970s has helped create an international policy agenda for the environmentalist movement.

Joyce Foundation: Provided grant support to test the market in carbon credits. Barack Hussein Obama sat on their Board for 8 years.

50 posted on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 11:36:03 PM by Calpernia | To 35 |

[Brugmansian]

Related thread from last month:

Goldman/AIG Conspiracy Theories: There is a reason they won't go away

[Porterville]

God’s work... I want to play God... do I just have to give bad loans without risk?

[Cindy]

BUMP and thanks for the ping, piasa.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

Goldman Sachs & Co., Gore’s No. 3 career patron

Goldman was Obama's #2 contributor in 2008, second only to the U of California system. And I noticed that the U of California made out pretty well from the Porkulus money, no surprise.