You know Goldman and Barclays. Bailed out to the tune of $12B and $9B, respectively, via AIG.
And, as I wrote in my diary yesterday, Barclays has been making a nice chunk of change peddling what some would call "dodgy tax avoidance schemes".
During Monday’s chat with Dean Baker, commenter "reader" mentioned CNN’s Rick Sanchez’s comments on the Geithner plan.
I took a look at the video; one of Rick’s guests, Robert Lenzner of Fortune.com said that what he heard from the hedge funds he spoke to that morning is that Goldman and Barclays will be acting as middlemen between the FDIC and the hedge funds. According to Lenzner, the two firms have been negotiating with Treasury and the FDIC "for weeks" He said they will be lent billions of $$ and don’t have to pay it back if they lose money, and want the hedge funds to come in with them.
This sounds like the part of Geithner’s program in which the FDIC will auction whole loans (and provide most of the financing).
So it is different than the program that Maxine Waters was talking about yesterday, when she asked Geithner whether Goldman would be one of the five fund managers that would manage the assets. That program is for buying toxic securities, not whole loans.
But it was misleading, at best, for Geithner to go on as if no decisions had been made about Goldman’s involvement in his plan.
Here’s a link to the video.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/03/23/nr.sanchez.banks.billions.cnn?iref=videosearch
31 Comments
Spotlight
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About The Seminal
Advanced search
been lovin’ your diaries, even though I feel increasingly powerless with each one :D
could be I’m letting my inner optimist run amok, but it does appear the national focus is headed Goldman’s way – as I noted last night, even some of the villagers are sniffing around. not a moment too soon
I think Geithner is going to get fired Obama is popular but even his perfume can’t clean up the scent of a turd.
This smells like a twenty first century S&L cleanout, I mean cleanup. Bailing out a rigged casino is not what we should be doing. But it’s clear the will of the people means little. Matt Taibbi nailed this, this is just a retrenchment and a gathering of more power.
allow me to peer in to the near future
Secretary Geitner: “yes, um, staff has had casual converations with these firms “
Geithner is quite simply lying through his teeth – and badly.
Connect all the dots here.
Geithner is pimping for David Rockefeller.
And this helps the real economy how? The Ponzai imaginary economy of the hedgefunds yes I understand how this helps them.
But really what effect will the hedges going under have for regular people new boss same as the old boss.
Does Goldman Sachs Run the World?
http://www.economicpolicyjourn…..world.html
Yup.
Bad liars who do not care enough to tell a good lie because they are not afraid of getting caught.
Is this a Harvard MBA thing?
Thanks!
When I started doing diaries, not long ago, I thought it would be therapeutic; even if no one read me, I could get it of my chest.
I find, however, that whenever I do one of them, I just feel complete disgust by the time I done.
The folks who have been blogging here for years are made of sterner stuff than me.
Seconded.
Goldman Sachs gets brokerage license in Saudi Arabia – MarketWatch Jan 21, 2008 … DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones) — Goldman Sachs Monday received a license to offer brokerage services in Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s largest …
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story…..11F… – 70k – Cached – Similar pages
saudi’s wonder why goldman sachs decides oil prices Last post: Jun 12, 2008
UPSTREAM NEWS…. http://www.reuters.com/article…..0220080612 http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=84361 ”Leading exporter …
http://www.city-data.com/forum/politi…..cides.html – 89k – Cached – Similar pages
Janushka, you, Ian, Scarecrow, Hugh, masaccio, and others have a gift for making really complex financial stuff accessible for the rest of us.
That ability is in desperately short supply.
BUT, when the crap gets too deep and the stench gets too bad, please take a break. We’ll get by somehow.
Abu Dhabi, Qatar buy stake in Barclays Bank – Banking & Finance … Oct 31, 2008 … GULF INVESTORS: Barclays Bank to raise $12 billion from Abu Dhabi and Qatar. …. Shares in Saudi telecoms firm rise on back of IPO …
http://www.arabianbusiness.com/536670…..clays-bank – Similar pages
Barclays Sinks In The Saudi Sands (OK – Qatar & Abu Dhabi) « Tony … Nov 21, 2008 … Not that you’re going to notice anything different with the bank. …. keeptonyblairforpm.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/barclays-sinks-in-the-saudi-sands/ – 41k – Cached – Similar pages
Government prevented from taking Barclays stake by deal with Abu … Jan 22, 2009 … So Barclays becomes a saudi bank and the saudis get to bail them out where is the problem? Steve Byrne, christchurch, UK …
business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5563223.ece – Similar pages
One advantage we have is that we already know we can’t trust Geithner or Summers.
OT, Januskha, you might enjoy going back and reading some of Jane’s and Christy’s early posts. I think they’re still archived. emptywheel had her own place back then. We were skating on thin ice back then too, and Jane wasn’t getting invited onto prime time cable, like last night. Progress not perfection.
Now, look at the dates involved in the sets of links I posted above.
January 21,2008 Goldman gets brokerage license in Saudi Arabia.
One year later,January 22,2009, because of a clause inserted into Barclay’s contract -at the request of the Saudis-the British government cannot take Barclay’s stake unless they pay the Saudis double.That last link is a MUST read.
__________________________
Perhaps a little OT,not sure, but worth a little bactrack,imho.
The same time frame being discussed here 2006-2008 was hot and heavy for the Saudis.
In 2006 some here may recall the brouhaha over the Saudi buyout and takeover of American Ports-including San Diego and New Orleans.Well, Barclay’s had been tapped to handle the sale,to my understanding. Braclay’s ad been the Saudi bank of choice for years,btw.
Well, the American public jacked back and said NO WAY!.
What’s a Saudi to do?
Sell the port deal to AIG,ofcourse .Eureka!
That was followed by the Saudis purchasing 20% of NASDAQ. {I’m getting visuals of Madoff,here,LOL.}If I’m not mistaken,Madoff had been gonefrom NASDAQ for a few years by then.
As I have postulated on another occasion, I don’t believe in coincidence when dealing with the concerted collusion of these financial cartels.
I still think the timing of Madoff’s voluntary mea culpa is not coincidence,whatsoever.Now,if he had a connection to Saudi investments,I don’t know.
am still attempting to unravel the six degrees of separation between AIG,Goldman,and Madoff.
Goldman and its ilk are part of an exclusive club — which has gotten smaller and smaller in membership over the decades through consolidation and ambiguation (is that a word?) — whose principal bread and butter has been as dealers in governments issued by Treasury. When I first learned of this group back in the late 1970s, it numbering about 20 trading houses at the time, I thought, wow, what an easy ride to great wealth that must be. Very cozy. Too cozy. You know cozy?
Take it further. If you cannot trust Geithner or Summers (or Rubin)…and you CANNOT trust them…then you cannot trust Obama either. They cannot be separated from Obama. Their policies and actions ARE Obama’s policies and actions.
There is no nonsensical Reaganesque, “I didn’t know why my people were up to!”
We are supposed to believe that Goldman became a bank holding company because a little pixie dust got sprinkled on it. We are supposed to believe too that there are now no more investment banks. This is hogwash. Goldman is, was, and will be primarily an investment bank. And this is exactly what investment banks do. They intervene at every (profitable) step of a financial transaction and do it for a fee. It doesn’t matter if the transaction is stupid or destructive. If someone wants it, Goldman is there.
That a backward thinking, market traditionalist like Geithner would turn to them is obvious. That Geithner is at heart as big a crony capitalist as Paulson should also by now be obvious to everyone as well.
I don’t have a problem with that.
IMHO Barack is a lot less bad than Bush. I think he’s a pol; if we can convince enough of the electorate, he’ll catch on. He’s incredibly popular right now and we have to focus on the primaries for the 2010 election cycle.
Wrongway Geithner and f*ck-up Larry imho are just trying to cover their mistakes.
Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone dated 03/19/2009 entitled, ‘The Big Takeover’ tells it all in really plain language (it ain’t pretty). Goldman Sachs is one dirty, double-dealing nest of crooks and liars, and their mind controlled moles are embedded in all the positions of power. I’m trying to believe that Obama is not one of them.
This is an 8 page article and not a word is wasted.
This is my 3rd time to post this link here at the Lake today. It’s very important – sorry if my repetition irritates.
plunger@7:
The repeated mantra by Geitner and Bernank that ”it’s too complex and will take so much time to unravel”…well, tack that on to the dogged lack of transparency,and we’re back at the old BCCI ,S&l template from the GHW Bush administration,arent’t we?
This link is especially for you,plunger.It is the ULTIMATE resource,imho, on BCCI. SPECIFICS,mind you- LOTS of them in this lengthy report.
The BCCI AFFAIR – 5 RELATIONSHIP WITH FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, CENTRAL … BCCI’s offices in Korea were among the bank’s smallest, containing just $92 …… He said, ’Barclays doesn’t keep receipts.’ I brought the receipts back to …
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/…..oreign.htm – 183k – Cached – Similar pages
BCCI was termed “the $20-billion-plus heist.” (Beatty, Jonathan; S.C. Gwynne. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI Beard Books (1993)).
Amidst the financial panic of 1986-88 that followed the drop of a barrel of oil from $39 to $13, many of these banks and S&Ls (and their land deeds and oil rights) were bought out for pennies on the dollar.
More than a thousand deregulated financial institutions went belly up and were looted. Deregulation allowed crooked bank managers to cash in on the junk bond craze that was sweeping Wall Street. Banks and S&Ls issued unsecured notes and plots of land and traded them in circles with other institutions to ring up the notional value to support cash-out loans for themselves and their partners.
It was during this period that the Saudis and Gulf states leveraged their earnings from American bank acquisitions through junk-bond mills, and then moved on to the 1996 Chemical-Chase and Citi banks consolidations in New York. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html…
Today, Prince Alaweed’s Kingdom Holdings owns a substantial and growing share of Citicorp, the largest bank in America, along with a portfolio of the nation’s largest financial, technology and media corporations. A similar process of slash and burn acquisition of the U.S. financial industry is now going on with the collapse of the U.S. mortgage and derivatives markets. See, http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/week… ; http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/business…
Gitcheegumee – your first nyt link is busted. would you try to post it again (or give the search parameters)? i’d like to read it. thanks!
Janushka – great catch. thank you!
Thanks, Gitcheegumee. I’ll read up on your linked info later.
The hero of shutting down BCCI was none other than John Kerry, and he stood against all others who kept after him to give it up. I’d like to believe there is still that John Kerry in the senate today. I wish he would pursue this current bunch of big bank criminals with the same bulldog tenacity.
You notice that the slickest crooks (GHWB and Harriman) came out of that with little or no damage and their $$$millions intact, and set about forming another bank…GHWB’s sons, Neil and Jeb, made out o.k. in the S&l scandals, too.
Gitcheegumee, while trying to locate the story at your broken link I found this blockbuster of BCCI, Citi, Bush clan, CIA, dirty money story. written by Wayne Madsen.
Have you seen it? What do you think about it?
A book called “House of Bush, House of Saud” (or maybe the other way around) pretty much showed Bush to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Saudi monarchy and its favored cronies.
Janushka, my thanks also for another great diary.
Janushka! Very nice work and a lovely catch. I sure didn’t understand all that as it flew by. But anytime ANYONE comes anywhere close to nailing Goldman Sachs for anything they’ve got my attention.
Sanchez had Lenzner on again on Wednesday ~ nothing dramatic, just ”tracking” Geithner and the re-regulation chat. It appears Lenzner is a sort of a regular. I like Lenzner! A good old fashioned investigative reporter with a brain.
Carry On!
yep.
blood and guts to write some of these posts.
thanks for doing it.
and remember in there somewhere that for a while, bush was not their bff. saudis told him to piss off in public.
heavy-duty deals and performance art going on.
january 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01…..washington
http://www.iht.com/articles/20…..php?page=2
january 2008 basically the same article, except for this on page 2
then in may 2008 said, oh, ok. look who won the deal. wonder what/who else was in contention that it took five months.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…..ullah.html
last sentence
this link is a list of articles, the first one is interesting, the saudi oil minister. a few how saudis had opened up the pipes, but bush wanted more, they said no. at first. in public anyway. until the bartering was finished.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/…..ne=nyt-per
and the kid who did this should have painted the words ‘bush’ on it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…..-home.html