If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Greg Smith's recent wail of resignation made it clear that Goldman Sachs has long lost touch with these simple truths. The thing is, though, you don't have to be a client of Goldman's to lose out, you just have to be, well, a human.
Political reality has this tricksy way of escaping from Hollywood's clutches.
People usually resign from a position through a private letter to the boss. Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs executive director, chose a different method: a powerful opinion piece on the editorial pages of the New York Times entitled, "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs."
So, this spring, when the Occupy Wall Street crowd comes out of hibernation, don't be surprised if the Tea Party joins them at a new location: 70 Pine Street, the N.Y. corporate headquarters of AIG.
In May, the first "whistleblower" lawsuit was unsealed, naming AIG, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank as defendants. Following motions to dismiss by the defendants, oral argument has been set. What does this mean?
The following conversation did not take place... but wouldn't it have been interesting if it did? Geithner: Glad I found you. We really need to talk...
A week or so ago, we read about what in the Gilded Age of the Roman Empire was known as a bacchanal -- a big blowout at which the imperial swells got together and whooped it up. This one occurred here in Manhattan at the annual black-tie dinner and induction ceremony for Kappa Beta Phi.
Thousands of people across the world are actively maintaining the front line of the Occupy movement; this article is not for those people.
The sole enclaves of banking choice now are Native American tribes endowed with sovereign powers pursuant to treaties or otherwise.
It's time to abolish credit default swaps and similar exotic, impenetrable, essentially unregulated securities. They add nothing to economic efficiency, they line bankers' pockets, and they add massively to global financial risks. Swaps were only invented in the 1990s. Before swaps, investors were perfectly capable of evaluating risks -- and there was less systemic risk to evaluate. The entire banking system is overdue for a drastic simplification that puts banks back in their legitimate business of evaluating risks and then holding onto them, rather than passing the hot potato to someone else. This will require a revolutionary power shift, and it is one the Occupy Wall Street protests are already promoting.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, like the American people, isn't anti-corporate, it's anti-corporate crime. The real question is: why aren't its critics like Herman Cain against corporate crime?
Think of Iraq as the AIG of wars -- the only difference being that the bailout there didn't involve just three payouts. More than eight years after the Bush administration invaded that country, the bailout is, unbelievably enough, still going.
Nature is sending us extravagant distress signals these days. We'd better get really good really fast at reading her mind. The stakes are too high to keep drinking the collective Kool-Aid.
So far, one group has been fairly quiet, if the point is to address the undue political clout and financial power -- to say nothing of economic risk -- now manifest in our leading banks. It is the voice of the American banker.
A decade of borrowing and greed finally culminated in the collapse of Wall Street, and it has taken three years for any visible protests to bubble to the surface.
Between Freddie and Fannie's latest woes and the United States Postal Service teetering on collapse, it's been a bad week or so for quasi-governmental agencies.
