I am sure that many of you have seen the new reports of the Goldman Sachs SEC suit. It is embarrassing to be an American when situations like this occur at the highest levels of our financial community and government.
Goldman Sachs is accused of conspiring with an investor to defraud investors in a mortgage investment securities scam. They created the fund from hand-picked mortgages and then sold shares in the fund as you would normally do. The problem is that the primary creator of this fund (Paulson) immediately began to sell the fund short and to bet on its losing value. Are we really stupid enough to buy their arguments that they did not find this behavior to be odd or highly unethical? At no time did they tell the investors that the instigator of the fund was betting against their success.
Goldman faces tough questions over SEC suit (CNN)
http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/20/news/companies/goldman_sachs_results/
Don’t you just want to scream sometimes? These are the same people that we just bailed out because they were too big to fail. To look at the overall economy versus how those bailed out banks are doing, makes you wonder if anyone at the highest levels really cares for the rest of us. These banks are back to paying themselves billions of dollars in bonuses while we hover at 10% unemployment and the prospects for a meaningful recovery appear dim for at least the next year. The banks are now charging 30% interest on credit cards when their borrowing rate from the Federal Reserve is under 1%. They now charge fees for having virtually any contact with them. The banks have made no bones about the fact that they are raising money as fast as they can to pay back the bailout money so that they can go back to paying their people whatever they want. Is it just me or did they miss the whole point of collapse?
It is discouraging to look around you and see that greed and avarice has been allowed to become institutionalized in this way. They made bad decisions with our money, wrecked the economy, got bailed out, and are now preparing to move on like it never happened. It is too bad the millions of people out of work right now and others taking pay cuts don’t have someone to bail them out. If they had taken the money they spent on the bailouts and funneled it to better unemployment benefits and job training, and let those banks fail as they should have, there would have been a terrible lesson for them, and something would have been learned. Instead they are back to their same old tricks and gouging the average person with outrageous interest rates and fees.
It is indeed shameful that so many have been made to suffer by the bad decisions of so few people, and that those very people, that caused so much harm are once again living the high life. Have we indeed lost our minds?
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I totally agree Steve - a portrait of the bad side of capitalism for sure. Moreover, while we discuss this travesty of fairness and righteous behavior, part of our Congre$$ is fighting legislation to set up financial regulation and oversight by our government - and as the Supremes recently decided that Corporations have the same rights as "we the people" in funding political campaigns, we can expect more of the same in the future. I'm not a negative or fatalistic person, but at this point in time, I feel the current poisoning of civil discourse and hate-filled divisiveness in Washington will keep us in turmoil for many years to come. Our government process SHOULD benefit from resolving disagreement, not be paralyzed by intransigent resistance to change.
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