How Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression. Price may have little to do with supply and demand as large players learn how to get around regulations that have been in place since the 1930s. Once again Taibbi tells it like it is. The FACT that Goldman Sachs has friends everywhere means few if any want to go up against them for fear of less money coming their way for the next big up or down move. They call it riding the gravy train.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine
<blockquote>Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman’s last real competitors — collapse without intervention. (“Goldman’s superhero status was left intact,” says market analyst Eric Salzman, “and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.”) The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed. Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds.</blockquote> It gets much worse… <blockquote>Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman’s primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite. </blockquote> The fact that no one in Washington is able to see this Conflict of Interest is PROOF few if any are willing to rock the boat in hopes they might be able to jump on board at some future date. THEY DON’T want to expose anyone, or any company. These people are not friends because they give out money to win elections. These people are milking the system for all it’s worth and no doubt laughing all the way to the bank. They have learned how to beat the system when the market goes up or down. They do this by having the economic and political power to move markets up or down via massive daily vol., betting they can get others to follow in lock step. Something that the rules set up in the 30′s were designed to STOP. Little did they know then the POWER one company could HOLD both in and out of Washington. If they make the bubbles without anyone in Washington exposing them? Then the FIX IS IN, for them and all their pals. When you see Bankers buying OIL to park it in some tanker off some coast somewhere that should tell you something. It tells me they are going to make every effort to drive up oil prices. Bankers driving up OIL PRICES. Then is it any wonder they are going broke. They should have been taken over 3 months ago, however no one wants to hear that. Maybe one day someone up there in Washington will WAKE UP to the conflict of interest issues and put a stop to it. If they don’t they should be replaced. How is this any different from what Lobbyists do. In fact this SHOULD BE REGARDED AS MUCH WORSE.
