Interesting article about Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffet teaming up to provide millions for budding entrepreneurs.

$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of of the global oil scam. It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in “Madoff Units” ($50Bn rip-offs). That’s right - $2.5Tn is 50 TIMES the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, yet it is also LESS than the MONTHLY EXCESS price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil. WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE? WHERE ARE THE INVESTIGATIONS? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate ”dark pool” trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.

"The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, believes banks serve a social purpose and are doing 'God's work.'"

The public is outraged about reports that Citi, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley along with other big New York employers, received hundreds, even thousands, of H1N1 vaccine doses before hospitals and other healthcare providers, many of which have run out of the precious drug. For Goldman Sachs, accused of unfairly benefiting from government bailout funds and its close relationships with administration officials, the problem is especially acute. Jokes are already circulating on Wall Street about how Goldman will create derivatives out of the few doses it has and begin trading them.

Wall Street bankers are really mad these days -- in both senses of that word! You'd think these whizzes of speculative finance would be ecstatically happy and filled with gratitude, not anger. After all, having crashed our economy, they were allowed to keep their cushy jobs, get bailed out with trillions of our tax dollars, and permitted to go right back to playing the same old casino games that had previously enriched them at our expense. Once again, such powerhouse outfits as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are raking-in tons of money -- and, as in the gilded days before Wall Street plunged Main Street into deep recession, bankers have promptly reverted to the selfish ethic of lavishing multimillion-dollar bonuses on themselves. Goldman, for example, has already set aside more than $16 billion to dole out as end-of-year bonuses for its bankers. That's a pace of self-enrichment that will siphon off nearly half of all the money that Goldman takes in this year! So, why are they mad? Because you and I are not showing them any love. Believe it or not, Wall Streeters actually expected that their return to grandiose banker bonuses would be greeted with huzzahs and "you the man" cheers from an admiring public, rather than another coast-to-coast explosion of anger.

The crime and corruption continues in the third part of this interview with Greg Gordon. "Inside investment circular were the details of a secret $2 billion deal channeled through a tax haven."

When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages. The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy. The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn't the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group. Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk. Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

New Jersey taxpayers are sending almost $1 million a month to a partnership run by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for protection against rising interest costs on bonds that the state redeemed more than a year ago. While New Jersey replaced the debt with fixed-rate securities in 2008 after the $330 billion auction-rate bond market froze, the swap -- in which two parties typically exchange fixed payments for ones based on floating interest rates -- isn’t scheduled to expire until 2019.The state paid $940,000 under the agreement last month and a total of $11.4 million since the auction-rate bonds were redeemed. The expenditures come as the fund reaches its borrowing limit and Governor Jon Corzine, Goldman’s former chairman who was a U.S. senator when the contract was signed, seeks $400 million in budget reductions as tax receipts fall.

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses, says Goldman Sachs vice-chairman --Goldman Sachs is currently on track to pay the biggest ever bonuses to its 31,700 employees after raking in profits at a rate of $35m (£21m) a day. 21 Oct 2009 One of the City's leading figures has suggested that inequality created by bankers' huge salaries is a price worth paying for greater prosperity. In remarks that will fuel the row around excessive pay, Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding their staff. Speaking to an audience at St Paul's Cathedral in London about morality in the marketplace last night, Griffiths said the British public should "tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all". --Tolerate *this.* http://www.legitgov.org/essay_southwell_arming_the_left_is_the_time_now_102203.html

AT the dawn of the progressive era early in the last century, muckrakers attacked the first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, for creating capitalism’s most ruthless monster. “The Octopus” was their nickname for Standard Oil. To counter [Rockefeller's reputation he decided] to dispense shiny souvenir dimes to adults and nickels to children as he moved about. Goldman is this century’s octopus — almost literally so. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, describes the company as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The news that the company was donating $200 million to its own foundation is roughly comparable to the nickels John D. handed out to children a century ago. The first stab at corrective legislation emerging from Barney Frank’s Financial Services Committee in the House is porous. The American public is still owed “a clear account of the financial events of the last two years and of who, if anyone, is seriously to blame.” Obama has consistently said all the right things about the “money culture” of “quick kills and bloated bonuses,” of “reckless behavior and unchecked excess.” “We know Obama has good values,” Jeff Madrick said last week, “but we don’t know if he has convictions.” What we also know is that if Teddy Roosevelt palled around with John D. Rockefeller as today’s political class does with Wall Street’s titans and lobbyists, the tentacles of the original octopus would still be coiled tightly around America’s neck.

When Wall Street’s commodities bubble crashed last year, I asked whether the next bubble might be in securitized body parts. Wall Street would search the world for transplantable organs, holding them in cold storage as collateral against securities sold to managed money such as pension funds. Of course, it was meant to be an apocryphal story about unregulated banksters gone wild. But as the NYT reports, Wall Street really is moving forward to market bets on death. The banksters would purchase life insurance policies, pool and tranch them, and sell securities that allow money managers to bet that the underlying “collateral” (human beings) will die an untimely death. You can’t make this stuff up. This is just the latest Wall Street scheme to profit on death, of course. It has been marketing credit default swaps that allow one to bet on the death of firms, cities, and even nations. And the commodities futures speculation pushed by Goldman (NYSE:GS) caused starvation and death around the globe when the prices of agricultural products exploded (along with the price of gasoline) between 2004 and 2008. But now Goldman will directly cash-in on death.

Larry Flynt, known to many Americans as an outspoken, fearless champion of the First Amendment, and pornography entrepreneur as the publisher of Hustler Magazine and various other enterprises, is speaking up about his belief that the American government has "...been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich..."

Charlie Gasparino reports that senior executives inside Goldman are in a panic over its image, trying to hire a "brand manager"—and even blaming a prejudice against the firm's Jewish chiefs. How worried are Goldman Sachs executives about their ability to manage the coming media tsunami when bonus season comes around?

The FED and Hank Paulson needed Buffett's image to sell the bank bailout and AIG rescue to the American public. Without Buffett's help Goldman Sachs ends up like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns.

Few things so powerfully illustrate the cowardly passivity of modern Americans than the lack of response to the news about Goldman Sachs. It’s OK to get angry, America! Here are some of the major volleys to date in this emerging story.

What the mainstream press can learn from a Goldman takedown. .... Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.

Boorish CEO behavior is legion. You can't swing a chandelier without hitting some lunkhead whose company is on the public dole while he collects a 400% bonus. Many say the proletariat's anti-fat cat feelings are merely jealousy. I say CEOs are like children - spare the rod, spoil the petulant little capitards.

An advocacy group on Wednesday launched a campaign to derail the nomination of a Goldman Sachs executive to a high position in the US state department because of his past role in raising public funds for a Chinese company linked to Sudan. Public Accountability Initiative, a not-for-profit organization, said Robert Hormats, whom Barack Obama nominated this week as undersecretary of state for economic affairs, had made misleading comments about the 2000 listing for PetroChina, the Chinese energy group whose parent, CNPC, has been present in Sudan since 1996. As vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, Mr Hormats told the Wall Street Journal in 2000 that “Sudan should not be an issue because of extensive legal firewalls in place to ensure that IPO proceeds are used domestically in China.” The Public Accountability Initiative said those comments were misleading, maintaining that firewalls were not in place, and that some funds from the IPO went to CNPC. “Hormats’s role in the PetroChina deal raises serious questions about his fitness to serve in a post that will give him substantial influence over international economic policy and US-China relations,” it added. Neither Mr Hormats, Goldman Sachs nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment.

Yesterday's opinion section of the Wall Street Journal offered convincing proof that those who want a progressive financial policy and those who simply want to save capitalism are in agreement about the madness of the administration's Wall Street policies. There, on the editorial page of the capitalist Bible, was a piece taking repeated shots at Wall Street darling Goldman Sachs. And, over on the opposite page, a two-fisted op-ed by former hedge-fund manager Andy Kessler in which he labels the government bailout of Wall Street "a dumb move" and "a bust."...the editorial, "A Tale of Two Bailouts," decries the fact that, thanks to the policies of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, Goldman "enjoys the best of both worlds: outsize profits for its traders and shareholders and a taxpayer backstop should anything go wrong." The editorial goes so far as to suggest imposing a tax (yes, the Wall Street Journal is proposing a tax!), an FDIC-style bailout tax to be precise, "for those in the too-big-to-fail camp." We've reached the point where the only people defending the administration's Wall Street policies are the people benefiting from them -- or their good friends, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers.