Goldman Sachs, the lords of time

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KH05Dj03.html


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Goldman Sachs, the lords of time
By Julian Delasantellis

Just for the moment, let's pretend that James Cameron's 1984 The Terminator was being made for the first time today, and, instead of the evil robots emerging from the fatally misguided foundries of Cyberdyne Systems, they came from the dark laboratories of Goldman Sachs.

From out of the future, a warrior is sent back in time to warn the present.

"You still don't get it, do you? They'll find your money!! That's what they do! That's all they do! You can't stop them! They'll wait for you! They'll reach down into your bank account and tear its f*&^*^g balance out!"

"Now just wait one cotton-picking moment!" I hear many of you



saying. A few weeks ago, in my review of Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone-published anti-Goldman Sachs screed, I demurred, advancing an argument that, although Goldman certainly proudly wielded the sharpest elbows in investment banking, they were not the eternal center of a global nefarious conspiracy of plutocrats that has been making the lives of average people miserable since the 1920s. (See Goldman good but not that bad, Asia Times Online, June 9, 2009).

I received a number of thoughtful and well considered e-mails over my disagreement with Taibbi, many making helpful and constructive suggestions on the order of "Up against the wall and die, you capitalist sellout rat pig ... " Therefore, one may consider this report on Goldman an attempt to return to the side of the angels. It's not - well, maybe it is. It's just that, as another chalk outline is drawn on the mean streets of international finance, once again Goldman's prints are found on the scene.

A few weeks ago, Goldman surprised the markets yet again, reporting second-quarter earnings at US$3.44 billion, much higher than expected, and, following similarly impressive results from the first quarter, almost back to the profit levels the bank, back when it was a buccaneering investment bank rather than the supposedly more sedate commercial bank it is now, was earning during the easy money days of 2007. Goldman's report was particularly curious in that two of its main Wall Street competitors, Bank of America and Citigroup, were able to report no such cornucopia.

Where were the profits coming from? Certainly not from intermediation, the bringing together of borrowers and lenders that is supposedly the core function of banking. There's just not enough economic activity currently going on to justify that much profit from standard intermediation. John Hempton of the Clusterstock blog suggests that Goldman is brokering sovereign wealth fund (SWF) purchases of US and British debt securities, but it is doubtful that the sharp operators running the SWFs would be leaving this many crumbs on the table.

Goldman's chief financial officer, David Viniar, attributes the outstanding results to "basic blocking and tackling", American football cliches for hard work at the business fundamentals. As the first 24-hour news cycle following the release came to an end, most observers, having generated no real alternative, were forced to accept the official story.

Then people remembered the bizarre spy caper story that ran the previous week, a story that we'll call, for lack of a better word, Codefinger.

On July 4, US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents arrested one Serge Aleynikov, up until early June a well-paid Goldman Sachs vice president for equity strategy quantitative analysis, or "quant", who worked for the previous two years on, as his Linkedin page put it,

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But just what was he doing? What was Goldman's secret? What was high-frequency trading?

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tricky bastards

remember all the shit he got for going against the DU grain re: Obama?

anyone have a list of all the GS connections in the current admin?