Good piece by Maureen Dowd:
The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.
Under pressure from regulators, who were trying to ensure that long-term performance was rewarded, the banks agreed to award more in stock, deferring cash payments.
But as The Times reported this week, the Goldman executives who […]

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Simply unbelievable.
Employees of Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health standpoint. In particular, Goldman has gotten more than Lenox HIll hospital, which needs it not just for the sick but more important, for workers
Update: More, from Reuters:
New York City […]

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Greed is love, and taking is sharing.
And Jesus would have loved Goldman Sachs!

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Dean Baker:

McClatchy Does Its HomeWork on Goldman Sachs
They have some good investigative work here, here, and here. If Fox went over Goldman with the same energy it pursued Acorn, no one in Congress would go within a mile of its lobbyists.
But Fox won’t go after Goldman, because Fox is ideologically committed to free markets, which […]

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The world according to Goldman Sachs.

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Unbelievable.
A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.
“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime […]

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But of course.

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Shocked, I’m shocked!
Well no, I’m not shocked:
For Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, an embarrassment of riches has turned into embarrassing riches.
Goldman’s bonus pool is expected to swell to an estimated $16 billion after what’s expected to be another stellar quarter, and Blankfein is struggling to figure out how to pay his employees in a way […]

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Via Matt Taibbi, this one I simply can-not-believe:

GOLDMAN Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein has warned his employees to avoid high-profile spending, as The Post reported — but his wife evidently didn’t get the memo.
Laura Blankfein and her friend Susan Friedman, wife of another Goldman honcho, Richard Friedman, caused a huge scene at Super Saturday in the […]

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Funny. Matt Taibbi with a definitive takedown of a particularly vapid “defense” of Goldman Sachs:
It’s not that Goldman cooked its first-quarter profit numbers, or was using a computer program that by its own admission could be used to manipulate the New York Stock Exchange, or that it got a special waiver for the entirety of […]

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Ah, Goldman Sachs:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ratcheted up risk-taking to an all-time high in the second quarter, increasing equity bets 58 percent to amass record trading revenue and quarterly earnings.
Value-at-risk, a measure of how much money the firm could lose in a day’s trading, rose to $245 million from $240 million in the first quarter, […]

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Via Matt Taibbi (whose latest takedown you should read here): This is called “saying what you think.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSwWy4E6I04

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Krugman. Read it:
Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts […]

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Goldman Tuesday here at Smart Remarks, but you know what? It needs to be.
This is Elliot Spitzer on Goldman, asking the key question around the 2:00 mark - the U.S. government/taxpayer - that would be you - has pumped billions into the financial system. Is it generating any jobs? And if it does not - shouldn’t […]

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From U.S. News and World Report, on why we should cheer Goldman’s big earnings:
And it’s hardly Goldman’s fault that it has benefited from programs meant to … benefit the financial sector. …
<snip>
Goldman and a few other AIG trading partners got a sweetheart deal on that bailout, but once again, the government was offering it. So […]

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Taibbi’s piece now online over at Rolling Stone, arguably one of the most influential pieces of the month, if not the year, on the basis of who’s attacking it - without any of those critics saying that Taibbi got his facts wrong. It’s just how he’s “interepreting” those facts.
While we argue about Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” […]

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Surprise, surprise.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Tuesday its second-quarter profit easily surpassed expectations as profit was buoyed by strength in its trading and underwriting businesses.
You, of course, saw the bizarre news last week that a former Goldman employee had left the bank and taken the bank’s proprietary trading code. Taibbi has more:
if you’ve followed Zero […]

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Cry me a river:
Now Goldman, expected to announced second-quarter earnings on Tuesday, finds itself in a no-win situation.
If earnings are too good critics may lambaste it for ramping up risk too much and embracing a hedge fund-like model that could make it vulnerable to big market swings.
If they fall short, investors may accuse the firm […]

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See, now, we knew this was coming.
Matt Taibbi’s amazing Rolling Stone article about Goldman Sachs is reverberating far and wide - now Time is writing about it. And being a bit more “balanced,” by saying hey, it’s not just Goldman! Which may indeed be true, but doens’t minimize the behavior Taibbi wrote about in the […]

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While liberals and conservative scream at each other, stuff like this goes on. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain…

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