ΩΩEven if this is rather boring sometimes, I like to see things in full and try to understand on my own and at the same time, put everything into context. So, in the case of the news about Goldman Sachs emails which openly discuss how GS profited from the collapse in value of mortgage bonds they bundled and sold, reading the emails and putting all of this in its time frame is very important. These emails clearly show that the clever dealers at GS were too clever by half. They ‘gamed the system’ set up by themselves when they, themselves, used political power to erase important post-Great Depression laws. That is, the opportunities they had for gains were based on a system doomed to fail thanks to these gains and systems set up by Goldman Sachs.
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ΩΩBecause of this, Goldman Sachs should be wiped out as an organization. That is, the very legalities that made these systems possible were pushed by GS top officers and thus, they legalized outright looting which they engineered and encouraged. This outrage should lead to charges of treason since they put our entire nation into severe financial and political peril, just so they could line their own pockets. Here is the first email from mid-November of 2007:
ΩΩThese ‘shorts’ involved AIG. So, in order to survive the collapse in the value of all those CDOs and OTC crap, the GS people had ‘insurance’ sold by AIG when AIG was fooled by Moody’s as to the true value of these paper products. The ratings were rotten but this wasn’t due to Moody’s being evil bastards but rather, due entirely, totally and utterly to Goldman Sachs guys being total bastards and utterly evil, especially their hedge fund pirate buddy, Mr. Paulson.
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ΩΩThey obviously conspired with Paulson to create, after a lot of negotiations, bundles of mortgages that would look as if they were solid and not a vapid mess and thus, fool Moody’s into rating them much higher than they deserved. And they deserved to be rated very low, about ‘X’ or maybe ‘Z’. Heh. That is, these were obviously worthless piles of sh*t.
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ΩΩTo understand what happened, we must look to the past and the best place is to visit my older blogs. There, we can see clearly how things operate in this mega-mess world. That is, were people really clueless? The answer is obvious: if I could figure things out, they could too. And of course, they did. The players in this game all knew they were playing with fire but the bonfire of vanities was so alluring, they all threw in our entire economic system in order to get rich, dumping immense amounts of debt on top of everything in sight, not just real estate.
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ΩΩSo, before we go to the other GS emails, I want to show how clearly my silly cartoons made things. It was painfully obvious which is why everyone in the mainstream media decided I was stupid. HAHAHA. I do get the last laugh since my record it sterling in this matter while the mainstream media stinks. And since I know at least one GS executive looked at my cartoons (until this person got very mad at me for obvious reasons) I know that they knew from my cartoons, the destruction of the housing bubble was inevitable as well as time-sensitive. That is, knowing when it was happening was important. And they knew very well, when the bubble popped. That is, by MARCH, 2006, over one year before this email above, they saw my cartoon here, from March 2007:
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Money Matters: New Home Sales Fall Off Obvious Cliff
Just one day’s shopping and stocks are way up because everyone thinks there is a pot of gold here somewhere. I examine the truth of what is going on and why this day’s shopping is a disaster in disguise.
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The pre-dawn sales frenzy is over — and now the tally begins. Steep discounts and expanded hours drew hordes to the nation’s malls in what merchants hope are signs consumer spending will be lively for the holidays. More people jammed the stores early, according to early reports, and more than a few testy shoppers scuffled in a rush to grab bargains, from notebook computers to cashmere sweaters.
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Several major retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Macy’s, as well as mall operator Taubman Centers Inc., estimated they drew bigger crowds on the official start of the holiday season than a year ago. Lena Michaud, spokeswoman at Target Corp., which had a strong holiday season a year ago, said traffic was at least as heavy..Every year, the discounts and sales grow bigger and bigger and the profit margins smaller. Comparing dollar amounts versus last year is a totally false reading of events. For inflation has set in, places where it can’t be easily cut. To fill and run the big box stores costs more this year. To make up for this, no pay raises for the workers at any level.
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ΩΩI explained how the falling prices via panic sales was due to retailers seeking to get consumers would fail because there was no more Home ATM feeding endless fresh dollars into our economic system. I even explained, way back then, that the destruction of this money would have to come off of the hide of homeowners via dropping value of real estate. That is, we either would have to have immense wage inflation to pay for this flood of money via degrading the value of the money due to too much money being created out of thin air or….we have a Japanese-style depression where wages drop and drop and drop while real estate drops even faster, we get no inflation at all. Instead, we get the destruction of the value of assets which is basically the definition of a depression: debtors don’t pay off loans.
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ΩΩHere is another prescient cartoon I did way back in mid-2006, back when the mainstream media was debating about whether there was even a real estate bubble or if it could even ever pop!
Money Matters: New Home Sales Fall Off Obvious Cliff
This is inevitable. Seems the home-ATM machine truly is shut down. Just like one can deplete all the money in one’s bank account, so can one run up to an upper limit in taking on loans. Loans against the value of real estate are tremendously cheaper than unsecured loans. The merchantile boom was due entirely to this effect. Now it will all crash down….The super low interest rates that caused this unseemly and economically disasterous balloon in house values made sense only if one thinks about paying off something monthly and praying it always goes up in value. I, personally, would rather pay a low price with a high interest rate. Why?
. Simple. The bigger the cost of the house, the more you have to pay off when paying it off! I buy low in the valleys of these cycles and then, when rates drop again, refinance and have little principle to pay off if I sell at a peak! One can make a lot of money this way.
. The problem with ditching these overvalued houses lies in the immensely powerful fact that when one sells a building, one MUST pay off the PRINCIPLE. Doesn’t matter how much one owes in interest! That is immaterial. If one has an interest rate of 9% (like I did in 1979) on a $35,000 property and I had already paid off $10,000 of the cost of the building, when I sold it for $165,000 because I renovated it and fixed up the neighborhood, I didn’t owe hardly anything on the property vs the closing price.
. If you pay 4.5% on $500,000 like many in California and the value drops to $400,000 which isn’t even half the value which happens quite often during troughs, then one owes $100,000 on closing! Gah! This is the dark, vicious heart of any real estate bubble. This is what kills the economy, all these people with such huge financial swords on slender threads over their heads!
. If, and this is quite normal, values drop 50% and people end up selling $500,000 properties for only $250,000, this is called “going bankrupt” and then Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae fall apart as they desperately try to unload a mountain of way-over valued buildings. This is where people who speculate on properties come in. They count the months, waiting for the trough to belly out which classically is around four years and then they begin house hunting at the middle range, not the white elephant top.
. This is assuming we have a middle class which I am increasingly doubtful about.
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Refusing to understand that much of our commerce that appears in the black side of the ledger are there only for political strategic reasons and not because we are fantastic traders and producers is highly important for Americans to understand for remaining childish and silly and not looking beyond the curtain means the termination of our empire and bankruptcy.
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“As expected, existing-home sales appear to be stabilizing, fingers and toes crossed,” said David Lereah, chief economist for the Realtors. Market fundamentals are improving, he said. Read the full report.
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Median sales prices fell a record 3.5% year-over-year to $221,000, the third decline in a row. Since 1968, when the Realtors began collecting the data, prices had never fallen three months in a row on a year-over-year basis.
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“Falling prices are “a good thing,” Lereah said. “Sellers are cutting their price enough to encourage sales,” said Pat Vredevoogd Combs, a Realtor from Grand Rapids, Mich., and president of the NAR.
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ΩΩDid any of these people commit suicide? I have a conscience. I couldn’t bear living if I gave such stupid advice or said such dumb things, destroying millions of people’s lives. But then, how many politicians would be alive today if they felt such guilt over such things? There would be suicide notes all over Congress! Psychopaths don’t feel guilt and many people find it very easy to be psychopaths! That is, this is the nature of the Cave of Wealth and Death: we are ALL psychopaths when we enter this dire place.
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ΩΩTwo of my stories from April 2007: Money Matters: Yet Another Big Mortgage Broker Goes Bust
Yet another subprime lender goes belly up: Mortgage Investment Lending Associates. I decided to visit their ‘defunct’ web page only they stupidly disabled only the opening page but using my superior computer skills (Google’s cashe pages) I was able to access the entire web site. It was a lot of fun, I could see instantly why they went bankrupt: they lent to people with bad credit. Duh.
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January 17, 2006 – MILA, Inc. today announced the introduction of Credex™ to its suite of growing broker resources it offers on its recently re-launched website, http://www.mila.com. Credex allows brokers to generate, qualify and capture sales leads by providing a no-cost online credit and loan application for their borrowers. Unique in the industry, Credex provides the only tri-merged mortgage credit report available in both English and Spanish direct to consumers and includes an automated FACTA notice, ensuring that brokers are compliant with legal requirements now mandated in all states. And it does it without requiring the broker to change any of his existing processes or spend a dime.
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ΩΩThere was a huge flood of Spanish applications for the goofiest of the debt instruments such as the infamous Alt-A loans. The innovation in late 2005, early 2006 of this online broker was to offer no-document loans to no-document illegal aliens. This is one of the more murky and hidden aspects of the collapse of our economy that few politicians dare discuss openly and honestly (see: politicians feel guilty and commit suicide.)—the flood of illegal aliens destroyed many things.
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ΩΩArizona’s right wing politicians are being chastised for going after illegal aliens with its clumsy laws but the fact is, we let in a flood of illegal aliens and then let them speculate in housing which is why many of the nastiest collapsed markets happen to coincide with states that were flooded with illegal aliens! California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, etc: all were heavily influenced by this flood of undocumented workers.
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ΩΩThe flood receded as businesses collapsed but even before this, many criminal types (illegal aliens are illegal, obviously) including drug dealers and gangs in prisons, played the speculative markets by getting multiple properties on cheap Alt-A loans and then flipping them. There was even a TV show about flipping houses. I knew this would end very badly back in 2006 and of course, it ended badly. Here is another story I did in 2006 about the flood of loans that was a true tsunami of historic proportions:
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ΩΩBack to the GS emails: This one was from after the Japanese carry trade began its tremendous crash starting in mid-August 2007:
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ΩΩGoldman Sachs was very worried about being tied to the looming collapse. They could see clearly the outlines of this collapse and the trends and could figure out the end results. That is, the ABX markets began their collapse to oblivion in mid-summer of 2007. Note the yellow highlights above, GS has this charity arm for PR purposes: GS Gives. Of course, GS takes much more than it gives.
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ΩΩLike Madoff, these con men figured they could run a scam forever if they were generous. These ‘charities’ are often pretty useless compared to the economic destruction these charities. Making everyone extremely poor while giving hand outs is not charity at all. It is still theft. The second part I highlighted was the concerns these Bilderberg bums have about being noticed: they are very worried the mainstream media might notice their obvious penetration of all political systems! Duh.
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ΩΩThis runs alongside worries that the ethnic/religious factors might also be noticed and discussed. There are many things these guys don’t want us to notice or discuss. They want us to be clueless. Just as the mainstream media doesn’t talk about how illegal aliens helped screw up our real estate markets with the help of GS and all the top banks in America. This draws way too many lines to various important individuals who should, if they had any sense of shame, commit ritual suicide.
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ΩΩToo bad the Bilderberg meeting couldn’t serve grape Koolaid. Here is the GS email from May, 2007, this is just two months before the collapse of the Japanese carry trade:
ΩΩThis is why these systems must be totally outlawed: GS created and sold these things, insured it with AIG and then made a PROFIT when these things went bad. The glee this caused at GS was probably tremendous. This is the problem: if something screwy or very bad or extremely destructive makes the destroyers richer, they will do this again and again until someone stops them. Such was the case with GS.
Now for the final email released by the government:
ΩΩI heavily edited this email so we could see the data better. Look at this catastrophe! May 17, 2007, most of the media was assuring everyone that falling house prices would not last and all would be well! But this was a false story. The truth is in these statistics. The LBML paper house built by Paulson and Goldman Sachs was collapsing. In November, 2006, already, in less than one year, in less than HALF a year, was seeing rapid bankruptcies of individuals owing money to this fund: $2.5 million in defaults with 31 jerks behind on payments.
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ΩΩThis shot upwards to 134 jerks not paying debts in May, 2007. And they owed $10 million. This is just six months of the beginning of the collapse. The loans that were still ‘alive’ went from 7,767 to less than 6,500 in just six lousy months. And this was the beginning, not the end of the collapse. Today, what is the number of people paying off loans in this fund? I bet, it is around 0. This monster-sized group of bundled funds were almost half a billion and this is just one tiny sliver of the immense housing debt market paper bundles that went bad!
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ΩΩGoldman Sachs issued a denial about these emails that is fun to read: http://www.goldman-sachs.com/our-firm/on-the-issues/risk-man-doc.pdf
- Goldman Sachs did not take a large directional “bet” against the U.S. housing market, and the firm was not consistently or significantly net “short the market” in residential mortgage-related products in 2007 and 2008, as the performance of our residential mortgage-related products business demonstrates. This is a total lie and of course, the emails prove this. The SEC can use this rebuttal as proof in court that GS lies about everything. I have been in court a number of times over the years and believe me, if you are caught lying openly about ANYTHING, your credibility crashes and the judge will be quite angry.
- Goldman Sachs was not a dominant participant in the residential mortgage-related products market. The firm’s net revenues from residential mortgage-related activities were very small, both in total and relative to the rest of our business. In fact, from 2003 to 2008, annual net revenues attributable to mortgage-related products, commercial and residential, never exceeded approximately 2% of the firm’s overall net revenues. In fiscal year 2007, the firm had less than $500 million of net revenue from residential mortgage-related products –approximately 1% of the firm’s overall net revenues. A couple dozen billion may be chump change for GS but it isn’t to anyone else. Also, who cares if they are the biggest or only the 6th biggest? This has no bearing on the case. It is simply, did they lie? Did they conceal important information to people buying GS-generated CDOs?
- Goldman Sachs did not have access to any special information that caused us to know that the U.S. housing market would collapse. In fact, as a result of the spread of the crisis from subprime to all residential mortgages, Goldman Sachs had overall net losses of approximately $1.7 billion with respect to residential mortgage-related products for fiscal year 2008. HAHAHA. They knew, big time! As I said above, one of them, at least, read my pathetic blog back in 2006 as they were cooking up these massive frauds. Besides, if I know something, they know the same thing since we are looking at the same data.
- Goldman Sachs did not engage in some type of massive “bet” against our clients. The risk management of the firm’s exposures and the activities of our clients dictated the firm’s overall actions, not any view of what might or might not happen to any security or market. HAHAHA. They insured themselves from losses in these paper products and note that their insurance paid MORE for losses than the value of the bonds in the first place and GS thought this was totally cool and cute and hoped it would happen more often. Ergo: they did more bad bonds and collected the profits off of screwy insurance swaps that paid more than they should.
- We maintained appropriately high standards with regard to client selection, suitability and disclosure as a market maker and underwriter. As a market maker in the mortgage market, we are primarily engaged in the business of assisting clients in executing their desired transactions. As an underwriter, the firm is expected to assist the issuer in providing an offering document to investors that discloses all material information relevant to the offering. So why didn’t they tell investors who were carefully selected by the con men to be defrauded, about Paulson’s battle to stuff as much junk and trash as possible into these bonds? And why didn’t they explain that ‘no document’ loans are extraordinarily insecure and in any downturn will cause the no document borrower to vanish into thin air?
- Goldman Sachs’ risk management decisions were motivated not by any collective view of what would happen next, but rather by fear of the unknown. The firm’s risk management processes did not, and could not, provide absolute clarity; they underscored deep uncertainty about evolving conditions in the U.S. residential housing market. That uncertainty dictated our decision to attempt to reduce the firm’s overall risk. This is pure bullshit. Again: I knew we were in a housing bubble before 2004. By the very end of 2005, right after Xmas, I knew the bubble had popped already. If I knew, they knew. And if they did’t know the obvious then they are not good financial advisors and thus, are FRAUDS and should be shut down for misrepresenting themselves to unwary investors.
- Goldman Sachs sold Collateralized Debt Obligations (“CDOs”) principally to large financial institutions, insurance companies and hedge funds with a focus on this type of product. These investors had access to highly detailed information that allowed them to conduct their own independent research and analysis. HAHAHA. True, these hedge funds were run by a bunch of pirates who didn’t care if they were taking in garbage since they sold all of this to individual investors who bought into these damn offshore hedge funds. Another reason to kill this business via invading all of those unregulated islands swearing fealty to Queen Elizabeth II.
- Goldman Sachs never created mortgage-related products that were designed to fail. It is critical to remember that the decline in value of mortgage-related securities occurred as a result of the broader collapse of the housing market. It was not because there were any deficiencies in the underlying instruments. The instruments performed as would have been expected in those unexpected circumstances.
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ΩΩThe final point is a total lie except for one thing: these mortgages were ‘created’ by bankers who should be dead and buried but are not, they are still living in fine homes and having fun. GS simply enabled these criminals to write these bad loans by funneling these loans into the hands of investors who thought they were buying AAA bonds, not junk bonds. This is where the lies all converge: the entire process was designed to LIE about simple FACTS and to hide the TRUTH: illegal aliens, gamblers and never-do-well spendthrifts were being handed immense loans by reckless bankers and GS sold these as solid investments, not warning everyone about an obvious bad end to all of this which was very obvious to ME back then.
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ΩΩThe housing market would have never collapsed if it wasn’t flooded with easy lending by bankers and brokers. The housing market collapsed because it was a credit bubble! The graph below, one I did back in 2008, clearly shows the asset bubble of all sorts which grew like crazy after 2002. It went from less than $5 trillion to over $35 trillion in a flash! And at the heart of this is Goldman Sachs and the other 5 mega international private investment banks working in collusion with the G7 central bankers to flood the planet with easy money. 50% of which was dollars and 30% of which was euros.
Money Matters: Explaining Hedge Funds And Recessions
ΩΩInstead of outlawing derivatives, Congress spins its wheels. 15% of Americans trust Congress and I am surprised with that number. I bet about half of these are guys who trust Congress are on Wall Street and AIPAC. Anything AIPAC or Wall Street wants, they get. If the vast bulk of Americans don’t want Wall Street to get something, they get it anyways. As we see with the bail outs. Paying GS and the other criminals 100% on losses on these loan deals when the government took over AIG is a prime example. I very much want GS to take the losses here. I want them to lose EVERYTHING. They deserve this. Then they can commit group ritual suicide.
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ΩΩHere is what the manic derivatives traders are doing this week: Derivatives Group Worries About Regulation – NYTimes.com
Financiers, lawyers, traders and accountants gathered this week at the annual International Swaps and Derivatives Association conference here to discuss “Collateralization and Netting — the Impact” and “Systemic Risk: Advances and Challenges in the Wake of the Crisis.” .
By Thursday night they needed to put out of their minds the specter of sweeping legislation to regulate the derivatives. .
They escaped to Supperclub, a bar and restaurant, where some plopped on the beds that covered the floor while a waiter in denim short shorts, suspenders and a scarf delivered drinks. The truly relaxed turned over on their tummies and received back massages from a dreadlocked member of the Supperclub staff. .
By midnight, others ended up in the S & M chamber with a bed-to-ceiling stripper pole and videos of dominatrixes playing in the background. .
“They don’t seem nervous,” said Iam Crowley, who also happened to be at the establishment because his girlfriend puts on a burlesque show for the guests.
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ΩΩHAHAHA. Of course, they love death-sex. They sit on the lap of the Goddess of Infinity and she eats their hearts and they don’t care, they have no hearts. They are full psychopaths. They feel comfortable, living in the Cave of Wealth and Death and have little interest in gentleness, kindness, selfless love or anything spiritual. They want raw power sex and they want it to be as PAINFUL as possible. This makes them feel better as they inflict tremendous pain and destruction all around. They don’t care if people starve, lose their homes or jobs. Having wild, irresponsible and utterly evil, decadent hilarity is fun.
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ΩΩTo hell with everyone and everything.
Culture of Life News 
“I have been in court a number of times over the years and believe me, if you are caught lying openly about ANYTHING, your credibility crashes and the judge will be quite angry.”
This is no longer true. Not at all. When presented with evidence that someone has lied, the judge will say he doesn’t care anymore, or he may even laugh at the outrageousness of the lie. When caught lying himself in open court, he will fine you and threaten to throw you in jail if you do not pay for revealing him to be a liar.
He will also make phone calls to prevent you from appealing to the police or judicial authorities for help. They will ignore you.
It’s the soviet style system, and it works.
Psychopaths, here there and everywhere; that money and power gather. Yes they take pleasure in sufferings of all others as that part of their brain is missing in action. Good book here: Snakes In Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work By Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare ReganBooks, 329pp. The standard psychopath tests should be administered to all the GollumSachs executives to confirm the disease diagnosis. But there is NO LAW against being a raving psychopath. Perhaps a 3 strikes you’re out kind of law is necessary for this group.
How to spot them: superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity, manipulativeness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, exploitativeness, independence, rigidity, stubbornness and dictatorial tendencies.”
Plus delusions of doing Gods work…haha
You make a good case, Elaine.
Your argument for negligent misrepresentation looks hard to beat to me. Fraud is famously harder to prove, although if I was on the jury I could find the evidence preponderates without going through the smoke-and-mirrors routine. Sachs will put on their smoke-and-mirrors act in front of 12 people in a box. Let’s hope they choose wisely.
One major distinction is that punitive damages are available in a fraud action. That may have the potential to achieve the desired effect of wiping Sachs out as an organization. If it only has to cough compensatory damages it will probably laugh it off.
A finding of fraud opens the door to criminal action as well; of course the proof standard is higher. Personally, I see no reasonable doubt here.
Maybe someone you know will be on the jury. Maybe it’s time to educate the public in the Southern District before anyone is sworn in.
“Arizona’s right wing politicians are being chastised for going after illegal aliens with its clumsy laws…”-EMS
Elaine I believe these clowns are being chastised because they huff and puff with glee about “illeagal aliens” with nary a word about NAFTA which destroyed Mexico’s economy–thus the impulse to immigrate. I believe the word for this is SURVIVAL.
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ELAINE: You are quite right. Yes, NAFTA is a very mixed bag for Mexico. Mexico sells the US lots of energy and it is basically our Saudi Arabia and we exploit Mexico outrageously (Mexico didn’t form an OPEC with Canada, sad to say).
you plainly see how the profits and kickbacks grew larger and larger at every turn for the worse and how the turns were programed to pay off, yet the same is true of doctors and drug companys….and requires the same sort of customer trust as given to Goldman brokers….
Read “Betting on the Blind Side” Vanity Fair.
Michael Burry of Scion Capital
“Michael Burry …. the 32-year-old investor spotted the huge bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market, in 2004, then created a way to bet against it, he wasn’t surprised that no one understood what he was doing. In an excerpt from his new book, The Big Short, the author charts Burry’s oddball maneuvers, his almost comical dealings with Goldman Sachs and other banks as the market collapsed, and the true reason for his visionary obsession.”
“Wall Street’s Naked Swindle” A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits….. by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone
“The nation’s largest financial players are able to write the rules for own their businesses and brazenly steal billions under the noses of regulators, and nothing is done about it. A thing so fundamental to civilized society as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note, or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer be protected, not even in a crisis, and a crime as vulgar and conspicuous as counterfeiting can take place on a systematic level for years without being stopped”
the snake is eating its’ tail……
Re: The players in this game all knew they were playing with fire but the bonfire of vanities…
AND
…So, before we go to the other GS emails, I want to show how clearly my silly cartoons made things.
You consistently derive future implications of strategic events.
It suggests a brutally logical and independent mind melded to profound humility that is (in my view) true self knowledge honed by surviving personal setbacks?
Often, I note that many influential people in the communities and institutions posses another form of power because they are narcissistic and focus on manipulation.
Perhaps, people with your abilities rarely achieve institutional influence because you are too honest and prescient?
Your use of mythology and iconic portrayals seem very Carl Jung as well?
I personally witness introverted “Group Think” in many Australian (and other countries) bureaucracies and professions that are So Washington and Wall Street.
In my experience, attempting reform within the system is impossible because “The Institutional Immune System” resists insightful honesty such as yours.
Below reveal such instances:
• Bill Black’s eye-popping opening statement at House FinServ hearing on Lehman Bros
• William White, Former Chief Economist Bank for International Settlements, notes why Neo- liberal economic theory closed minds
http://ineteconomics.org/
Our cultures need to change …but how?
Goldman sachs is the smartest crook
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but they worked as government alumni and bumped elbows with the keepers of democracy in promising some faith
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the smartest betrayed even the most modern of governments into manipulation and fraud
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-53565441845289277&q=nuclear+fision&total=185&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
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say what
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Economy2010/idUSTRE63L55W20100422
(Reuters) – Rich countries may not be able to resharpen their crisis-fighting tools fast enough to get them ready for the next downturn, leaving them increasingly reliant on cash-rich emerging powerhouses to ensure stability.
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NWO
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thats my greatest fear… imaging a sucess for despotism and tyranny via banking
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we need to do business as usual or we cant get oil or refined commodities
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not that the government is an overt failure of itself
You are so right, these people
have no conscience. Pure Evil.
“Poorer Nations Get Larger Role in World Bank”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/business/26bank.html?src=busln
The headline says “poorer nations,” but the only one mentioned is China.
Oops, mea culpa. It does mention developing countries besides China.
there should be a huge focus on the credit rating agencies that “rated” this debt, in light of the fact that they are owned and funded by the very banks who create the securities they rate.
i think going after goldman sachs is only going to be the beginning of this. i think the government thinks that they can have a simple civil penalty paid and then go back to business as usual, but i think the door has now been opened and won’t be closed so easily.
The door has been blasted off its hinges. About the supposed unknown genius who spotted the housing bubble story: HAHAHA. How stupid is that? It didn’t take any genius to understand or see that bubble nor to see its bursting. Lots of us saw this from far off. Back when Greenspan dropped rates to 1% while the price of oil doubled was obvious, this would cause a bad bubble. Running rates well below the true rate of inflation is very dangerous.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/bob-janjuah-we-are-trapped-some-sort-horrendous-keynesian monetarists-nightmare
.
ALREADY, the current administration has made it far more attractive than 2 – let alone 20! – years ago to be a long term unemployed person thru increased benefits etc. The US is catching the European disease and something that was and is again a big problem in the UK also – that it is, for many folks who lack the required skills/education, far more attractive to be ‘permanently’ unemployed and on benefits, rather than working in unskilled jobs.
.
if only so the rich can feel 90’s again
ALL CAPS IS BANNED
HAHAHAHAHA is banned
COR PORATE SOCIAL ISTS is banned
why is ‘corporate socia lists’ banned?
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ELAINE: You must have triggered the Spam Filter Beast here. All web sites get hammered by thousands of spam.
@nah
“that it is, for many folks who lack the required skills/education, far more attractive to be ‘permanently’ unemployed and on benefits, rather than working in unskilled jobs.”
Depends how you look at it. In order to have a steady society the poor have to be looked after.
But one thing is sure. 10% unemployment is the new norm for US now.
You will have to have health care and benefits in order to keep the peace in society (taken care of at the moment).
The jobs are not coming back and taxes will rise at some point making jobs even harder to find.
Welcome to the club of 50% overall taxes and lifetime unemployment 😉 .
This is what 60 minutes should have had last night. From Bill Moyer’s journal an interview with Wm Black
Gt. report. Vips said ‘give me a true
rate of interest not a low rate,
so i can put my house in order.”
But precious metals bugs not
that w/out a numiere/common
standard not an i.o.u., every one
is broke / there is no way to evaluate
assets. see extent and pretend,
and gold prices since 1490. (True,
sad, 1860: $1500 in coin buys a]
worker in bondage).
I love blogs like this!
@DeVaul
“A judge is a law student who corrects his own papers”. (hl mencken)
@JT
And the only way to have a growing welfare state, which is what the benefits you describe are, is to debase the dollar. The only way to get the money from debasement is to take it from savers and other storers of money not needed for immediate consumption. Think: low interest rates into infinity.
While the wealthy can easily absorb a hit to the value of their dollars, that same percentage decrease in purchasing power for the middle class is going to hurt but hard.
Flipspiceland: “the only way to have a growing welfare state, which is what the benefits you describe are, is to debase the dollar.”
Don’t fall into the false dichotomy. There are solutions other than “massive welfare state” or “let the poor starve”. The economy can be stimulated and protected in order to create more jobs (which I think is the option Elaine favors). Or there are the varieties of socialism, where government owns some or all of the economy outright. And other ideas.
The mainstream view is that market forces are like gods. Inevitably the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, so the only debate is “Must we really pay taxes in order to keep these unproductive people alive?” But the ‘free market’ is not God.
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ELAINE: Protectionism, protectionism, protectionism! That is pretty much my motto at this point.
@flipspiceland
Inflation is the path of least resistance, I agree with you there.
IMO US will choose longer unemployment benefits and healthcare for poor over civil unrest.
And inflation over paying debts off.
Taxes I´m not sure about. Will they rise now? At the latest they will rise if/when the dollar loses it´s reserve currency status.
@Steve Murgaski
The wisdom is somewhere in between I think. Welfare state has it´s problems as does everything else.
Smart people get lazy in a welfare state (why bother earning more than 3500€/month when most of it goes to taxes). Welfare state wastes different resources.
IMO progressive taxes are the key.
Poor pay 5% and the rich 50% here (and 50 is too much).
Millionaires and superwealthy are viewed as a failure of the system here in the Nordic countries and our society is not as focused on just money as the US.
Failure of the system vs the american dream.
That´s how I would try to sum up the difference in thinking.
All taxes should be progressive that is the best advice I can give.
Are You Interested In Discounted Power of Sale Homes In Toronto?
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ELAINE: No.
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