Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Arming Goldman With Pistols Against PublicFrom Bloomberg; hat-tip to Taki M. When did Bloomberg get so radical? Will they be joining us at the barricades with pitchforks? Given the disclaimer at the end, maybe just Alice Schroeder will come along.Commentary by Alice Schroeder Dec. 1 (Bloomberg)—'I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,' said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank. I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it's true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn't call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that 'as a preliminary matter' it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names. While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image—and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman's greed 'God's work' and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were 'clearly wrong.' Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage. Pistol Ready Common sense tells you a handgun is probably not even all that useful. Suppose an intruder sneaks past the doorman or jumps the security fence at night. By the time you pull the pistol out of your wife's jewelry safe, find the ammunition, and load your weapon, Fifi the Pomeranian has already been taken hostage and the gun won't do you any good. As for carrying a loaded pistol when you venture outside, dream on. Concealed gun permits are almost impossible for ordinary citizens to obtain in New York or nearby states. In other words, a little humility and contrition are probably the better route. Until a couple of weeks ago, that was obvious to everyone but Goldman, a firm famous for both prescience and arrogance. In a display of both, Blankfein began to raise his personal- security threat level early in the financial crisis. He keeps a summer home near the Hamptons, where unrestricted public access would put him at risk if the angry mobs rose up and marched to the East End of Long Island. To the Barricades He tried to buy a house elsewhere without attracting attention as the financial crisis unfolded in 2007, a move that was foiled by the New York Post. Then, Blankfein got permission from the local authorities to install a security gate at his house two months before Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed. This is the kind of foresight that Goldman Sachs is justly famous for. Blankfein somehow anticipated the persecution complex his fellow bankers would soon suffer. Surely, though, this man who can afford to surround himself with a private army of security guards isn't sleeping with the key to a gun safe under his pillow. The thought is just too bizarre to be true. So maybe other senior people at Goldman Sachs have gone out and bought guns, and they know something. But what? Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and—oh yes—the other banks. People 'were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.' Torn Curtain There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm's revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses. This slip-up let the other bailed-out banks happily hand off public blame to Goldman, which is unpopular among its peers because it always seems to win at everyone's expense. Plenty of Wall Streeters worry about the big discrepancies in wealth, and think the rise of a financial industry-led plutocracy is unjust. That doesn't mean any of them plan to move into a double-wide mobile home as a show of solidarity with the little people, though. Cool Hand Lloyd No, talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them. And if the proles really do appear brandishing pitchforks at the doors of Park Avenue and the gates of Round Hill Road, you can be sure that the Goldman guys and their families will be holed up in their safe rooms with their firearms. If nothing else, that pistol permit might go part way toward explaining why they won't be standing outside with the rest of the crowd, broke and humiliated, saying, 'Damn, I was on the wrong side of a trade with Goldman again.' Alice Schroeder, author of The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own. Labels: Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, Warren Buffet Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Fed Ordered To Disclose Emergency Loan DetailsFrom Bloomberg (the plaintiff, no less):Court Orders Federal Reserve to Disclose Emergency Loan Details By Mark Pittman Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) The Federal Reserve must for the first time identify the companies in its emergency lending programs after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled against the central bank yesterday, rejecting the argument that loan records aren't covered by the law because their disclosure would harm borrowers' competitive positions. The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under 11 programs, most put in place during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, saying that doing so might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders. Bloomberg LP, the New York-based company majority-owned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sued on Nov. 7 on behalf of its Bloomberg News unit. "The Federal Reserve has to be accountable for the decisions that it makes," said Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, after Preska’s ruling. "It's one thing to say that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution. It's another thing to say that it can keep us all in the dark." The judge said the central bank "improperly withheld agency records" by "conducting an inadequate search" after Bloomberg News reporters filed a request under the information act. She gave the Fed five days to turn over documents it told the reporters it located, including 231 pages of reports, and said it must look for more at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which runs most of the loan programs. Read the rest of the article Labels: Bloomberg, Federal Reserve, financial crisis bailout Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). More on AIG Bailout and Goldman's EarningsSent in by our long-lost collective member Faisal Chaudhry:Fresh on the heels of the euphoria in the financial press about Goldman Sachs reported first quarter earnings of $1.66 billion, a recent entry on our blog (Questions About Goldman's Great Quarter) asked how much of the current profit is a result of Goldman's getting full payment for its previous financial bets from AIG. While the answer is not clear yet (and likely will remain so), the Monday edition of Bloomberg's "On the Economy" radio program with Tom Keene and Pim Fox (access the audio here) provided a fascinating look into what Wall Street's take on the matter is. The passage from nonplussed nonchalance to equivocating chagrinned concession that Gary Townsend of Hill Townsend Capital undertakes in the space of two plus minutes is priceless for what it reveals about how these questions are regarded, parsed, and set aside by the lords of finance. (Jump to the 11m 6 sec mark .) With a barely subdued glow, Townsend's monotone first points to Goldman's go getter attitude in proposing to use the newfound confidence it has earned in the eyes of the market by rolling up its sleeves and raising $5 billion in equity through sales of its shares in order to "unpartner" itself from its pesky and "unhappy" TARP-induced relationship with the government. He next lodges his "personal" opinion that the companies "who were not particularly interested in accepting the TARP" funds should not be faced now with any restrictions whatsoever on when they can repay the bailout money and "get out" of said pesky relationship. When faced with the obvious next question from Fox about whether Goldman's first quarter would have been as good as they were had it not taken the TARP money it supposedly "never wanted" in the first place, Townsend's swagger starts fading as he lunges towards evasion by highlighting the "additional expense" from the preferred dividend that Goldman has had to pay out to the government already and that has "presumably, worsened the [first] quarter [earnings]" now being reported already. As if it wasn't curious enough to be apparently unable to parse the type of catastrophic cost Goldman's bottom line might have suffered had the "unwanted" bailout money never been poured into its coffers in the first place, things only get worse when Fox asks Townsend what role the credit default swaps paid out during the quarter to Goldman by AIG (via the "unwanted" moneys the government foisted upon that company) played in the $1.6 billion first quarter. You can hear Townsend start folding under the weight of his own inconsistencies (at the 12m30sec mark) after he is left little choice but to concede that the answer to the "very interesting question" he first suggests awaits more data must certainly be in the affirmative. As he grudgingly concedes "what seems to have happened is that the Government is fulfilling the obligation to Goldman and others on the other side of the CDS's" . Alas, he must let drop that "indeed, the government has provided that value [of the AIG bailout] to Goldman." He is sure, however, to ask rhetorically before closing "[but] isn't that rather obvious?". It would seem that a mere two minutes earlier, of course, it was not, at least, to Townsend's mind. As for Wall Street's collective mind, we won't hold our breath. --FC Labels: AIG, bailout, Bloomberg, Faisal Chaudhry, Goldman Sachs, TARP program, Wall Street Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). World Bank and Food Crisis (Bloomberg--!)A critique of the World Bank and the Washington Consensus--at Bloomberg, of all places. This is part 3 of a 7-part series entitled "Recipe for Famine." Hat tip to DRedmond at lbo-talk. Look for a feature article by Mark Engler on the decline of the Washington Consensus in our January/February issue.World Bank's 'Wrong Advice' Left Silos Empty in Poor Countries Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Inside and out, the rusted towers of El Salvador's biggest grain silo show how the World Bank helped push developing countries into the global food crisis. Inside, the silo, which once held thousands of tons of beans and cereals, is now empty. It was abandoned in 1991, after the bank told Salvadoran leaders to privatize grain storage, import staples such as corn and rice, and export crops including cocoa, coffee and palm oil. Outside, where Rosa Maria Chavez's food stand is propped against a tower wall, price increases for basic grains this year whittled business down to 16 customers a day from 80. "It's a monument to the mess we are in now," says Chavez, 63. About 40 million people joined the ranks of the undernourished this year, bringing the estimate of the world's hungry to 963 million of its 6.8 billion people, the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said yesterday. The growth didn't come just from natural causes. A manmade recipe for famine included corrupt governments and companies that profited on misery. Another ingredient: The World Bank's free-market policies, which over almost three decades brought poor nations like El Salvador into global grain markets, where prices surged. "The World Bank made one basic blunder, which is to think that markets would solve problems of such severe circumstances," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "But history has shown you need to help people to get above the survival threshold before the markets can start functioning." Read the rest of the article. Labels: Ban Ki-moon, Bloomberg, El Salvador, Jeffrey Sachs, World Bank Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
