Imagine 100 Goldman Sachs banks running America and the world. It’s happening. Forget politicians, Big Banks rule the world.
It was just a few years ago in “The Great American Bubble
Machine,” a Rolling Stone feature, that Goldman was indicted by Matt
Taibbi: “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.”
Yes, till recently Goldman Sachs was boss, everywhere, the
“world’s most powerful bank.” Taibbi: “From tech stocks to high gas
prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation
since the Great Depression.” What an indictment.
Today every bank in the world is a Goldman wannabe. That’s
capitalism at its peak. All competing to be the world’s most powerful
bank. Seriously, look around: Your world really is dominated by this
amazing new innovation emerging from capitalism — a bizarre conspiracy
of Big Banks, maybe a hundred Goldman wannabes. These new Big Bank
capitalists are rewriting the history of the world.
But we’re getting ahead of the story. Let’s review Goldman Sachs role in creating this new Big Banks Conspiracy.
Goldman Sachs, now the role-model for all global Big Banks
In “The Great Bubble Machine,” Taibbi says Goldman was the
mastermind behind every great bubble in American history since it was
founded in 1869 by Marcus Goldman and his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. Yes,
one bank gets blamed for America’s amazing history: Bubble 1: the Great
Depression. 2: tech stocks. 3: the housing craze. 4: $4 a gallon gas. 5:
rigging the bailout … and now the latest Bubble 6: Global Warming.
Example: early on in this indictment, Taibbi focused on a
chapter in John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic “The Great Crash, 1929,”
titled “In Goldman Sachs We Trust” where the Harvard economist singles
out Goldman’s “Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of
the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a
major cause of the market’s historic crash; in today’s dollars, the
losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion.”
That’s almost a half trillion in today’s dollars, prompting
Galbraith to add: “It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination
which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity … If there must be
madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.”
That’s Goldman Sachs key to success, crazy like a big fox, a
mad money machine, an awesome Bubble Machine, making history, dominating
the world from America.
Goldman Sachs mantra for domination: ‘Madness on a heroic scale’
Yes, Goldman Sachs’s reputation for over a century has been
grown with this “madness on a heroic scale,” winning big because of its
“gargantuan insanity,” constantly pushing the boundaries of ethics,
integrity and morality while year after year since 1869 this “great
vampire squid” keeps winning big.
So Goldman Sachs is the gold standard against which all other
banks must compete, the front-runner in profits and wealth creation, the
role model that defined the moral code necessary for competing in
today’s financial world.
Goldman possesses a certain bold madness and borderline ethical
behavior that today has not only been adopted by all its competitors on
Wall Street but has also become the moral code running the collective
brain of capitalists everywhere, corporate CEOs and Washington
politicians.
And today it is being rapidly adopted by business and political
leaders across the developed world, wannabes all competing, fighting to
be the next Goldman Sachs.
All Big Banks now competing to be next Goldman Bubble Machine
Get it? Every bank in the world is now a Goldman wannabe. A
subtle conspiracy. That’s globalization and capitalism at its best, all
competing for a piece of the action, for the top spot formerly held by
Goldman Sachs. Yes, a few short years ago Goldman Sachs was “the world’s
most powerful investment bank.”
Today’s world includes four Wall Street banks each with assets
over $1 trillion, each more than Goldman. Plus eight other big global
banks each have over $2 trillion total assets, including, among the 100
largest, Barclays, HSBC, Deutsche, ICB-China and Japan’s Mitsubishi.
Yes, this new world is changing fast. Back in 2008 the world’s
financial banks were in ruins. Wall Street sunk into virtually
bankruptcy. Goldman and its Wall Street too-big-to-fail co-conspirators
had trashed the global economy, triggered a virtual depression, and Wall
Street’s casinos lost over $10 trillion of Main Street retirement
funds.
But thanks to their Trojan Horse in Washington, Treasury
Secretary Hank Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs CEO, the banks were able
to deceive, con and manipulate Congress into bailing out not only
Paulson’s old firm, but all his buddies in the Wall Street banking
community, by giving away over $30 trillion of free cheap money, to be
paid for by future generations of taxpayers, investors and a
high-unemployment, weak recovery.
Yes, the Goldman Bubble Machine phenomenon turned into a
rapidly spreading virus after 2008, infecting all banks worldwide. How?
Pure capitalism, competition grounded in basic human psychology,
behavioral economics and neuroscience research.
As we wrote recently, this “moral bankruptcy” virus
was hard-wired in the collective brain of all the world’s bankers — a
virus that began a long time ago in the Goldman Bubble Machine and now,
since the banking industry’s 2008 near-death experience, has morphed
into the new Big Banks Conspiracy that’s taken over the world.
Mass corruption is now the ‘new normal’ for global Big Banks
Don’t believe me? Any doubts about the world domination trend driving the Big Banks Conspiracy, then go to “The Big Picture,” one of the world’s leading financial blogs run by Barry Ritholtz,
author of “Bailout Nation.” Last week he posted a powerful
“Washington’s Blog” on the “Manipulation” that’s is a pandemic of
corruption across America and the global banking world. That analysis of
“Manipulation” is brilliant. Here’s a summary:
But before you read: You must mentally translate all references
to “manipulation” into what they really mean, phrases like: corruption,
scam, con job, gaming, cheat, fraud, price-fixing. Why? Because that is
the real meaning: Wall Street and the world’s Big Banks are not merely
engaged in “manipulations” common in commercial transactions.
The banking industry is engaged in a subtle conspiracy of
unethical, immoral, dishonest, corrupt, illegal, and outright criminal
behavior, for profits … cheating investors and taxpayers, conning the
government, buying off politicians and setting America up for a massive
crash, bigger than 2000 and 2008 combined. Their rationale? That’s the
logical next phase for capitalism!
Far worse, this dark behavior has already metastasized far
beyond the pre-2008 actions of the Goldman Sachs Bubble Machine. Today
this behavior is everywhere. “Everything is rigged.” This corrupt
behavior is so pervasive among banks, even the American people seem to
accept it as part of our economic “new normal.”
Yes, this behavior is so common not only do bankers believe it
is essential to compete in today’s capitalist world, their clients in
Corporate America and throughout the global business world accept it.
Big Bank Conspiracy has ‘broken virtually every law on the books’
Today, “big banks manipulate every market they touch … huge
government subsidies were used for speculation … throwing money at banks
doesn’t help the economy.” In fact, despite his delusion of saving the
world economy, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s policies were “a major source
of the crisis.” To stabilize the economy we need to “break up the
banks,” but unfortunately “the big banks own D.C. politicians.”
The Washington’s Blog on “The Big Picture” is the must-read of
2013. exposing how Wall Street and the banking world are taking over
America. Read some of their more than 50 links to all the toxic examples
of the banking conspiracy driving our world to the third market crash
of the 21st century, a collapse of the economy and the Great Depression
II.
Beyond the tens of millions of overcharges in energy markets,
Wall Street’s “Big Banks have manipulated virtually every other market
as well — both in the financial sector and the real economy — and broken
virtually every law on the books.” Yes, they’re corrupt.
Here are more examples of the Big Banks Conspiracy’s illegal
manipulations: They “have been conspiring for decades to manipulate
commodity prices” with a wholesale “takeover of the real economy as well
as the financial system.” Their conspiracy includes widespread insider
trading … rigging Libor interest rates for
$800 trillion in assets, which still hasn’t stopped … price-fixing the
$1,200 trillion derivatives market … currency markets are “massively
rigged” … gold, silver and oil prices are illegally fixed … Today
virtually “everything can be manipulated through high-frequency trading …
stocks, bonds, options, currencies and commodities.”
The 50-plus examples of the Big Banks Conspiracy also includes:
Price-fixing of billions in fraud against local governments and pension
funds … bogus fees to store gold bullion, without ever owning gold …
frauds in mortgage origination fees … cheating homeowners in
foreclosures … charging unlawful mortgage fees … pushing bad investment
deals “then betting against the same investments.” … illegal
front-running and “wash trades” … “participating in various Ponzi
schemes” … “cooking their books” … and “bribing and bullying rating
agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments.”
Bottom line: Goldman Sachs has become just another
second-stringer in the new global Big Banks Conspiracy as capitalism
appears about to self-destruct Adam Smith’s ideal and trigger the third
major market crash of the 21st century, followed by a collapse of the
economy, driving America and the world deep into a new Great Depression.
Be prepared.
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