Goldman Sachs

Elizabeth Warren recently wrote a rather extraordinary piece on the hollowing of the American middle class and the need for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Consider the following: 1 in 5 Americans is unemployed or underemployed. 1 in 9 American families cannot make the minimum payment on their credit card. 1 in 8 mortgages are in default or foreclosure. 1 in 8 Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 American families are filing for bankruptcy every month. When adjusted for...

A McClatchy journalist has published an article describing the apparent conflicts of interest that exist within Goldman Sachs. Goldman has materially benefited from its short positions on U.S. housing-related assets. These short positions were created for the firm's own accounts. At the same time, Goldman served as a distributor of the same housing-related assets, aiding many of its institutional clients in establishing meaningful long positions in an asset class for which the firm presumably...

Representative Darrell Issa has asked the New York Fed and AIG to provide related to the $14 billion Goldman Sachs received from U.S. taxpayers via AIG during the financial crisis. Representative Issa the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. According to Issa: The payments may “amount to nothing less than a backdoor bailout of AIG’s creditors,” the California Republican said in the letters, citing an Oct. 27 Bloomberg article about the New...

In a very interesting piece of investigative journalism, Bloomberg is exploring the link between decisions made by the New York Fed under Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and billions of taxpayer dollars directed to select investment banks--including Goldman Sachs--at the height of the financial crisis in November 2008. Under Geithner's leadership, the New York Fed made a decision to reimburse several banks in full for counterparty positions in credit-default swaps with AIG. Bloomberg...

50 million Social Security recipients will have to live without a cost of living adjustment in 2010. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has set aside $16.7 billion for employee bonuses--an average of $526,814 per employee. And this is just a start for Goldman. The company is on pace to set aside a total of $21 billion for 2009 bonuses, and amount in the range of records set in 2007. Take a look at both of the articles below for a stark reminder of how skewed and hypocritical the administration's...