Goldman Sachs - The big bubble machine
Since the beginning of the month, an important article in the July issue of Rolling Stone magazine has been making a lot of noise in the blogosphere as well as in traditional media around the world. It exposes the role of the investment bank Goldman Sachs in almost all the financial crises since more than 80 years. It sheds light on past and contemporary financial and economic events. The author, Matt Taibbi, is an investigative journalist with courage, in my opinion, comparable to that of Denis Robert. The subject is primordial, the serious inquiry, the explosive information, the incisive tone. Matt Taibbi calls a cat a cat. The whole is understandable by the uninitiated in finance.
Since the publication of this article, Goldman Sachs has published its results: they are better than ever. And the bonuses are increasing. This latest news is a perfect confirmation of Matt Taibbi's investigation.
To those who can, I advise to read the article in its original version, the style is excellent. For the others, as there was no French version to my knowledge, I made a translation of it. Here it is below.
Links to the original version: here and there for a scanned version of the article paper, there, there and there for a text version after processing by character recognition (it is actually the same version but some words have been voluntarily changed by the user who has done the character recognition). The really authentic version is that of the scan. I read the article by Matt Taibbi counterinfo.info and I used for translation this version, but correcting the differences that I could detect.
The big American bubble machine
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone - July 2009
Translated from the English by JL
High-priced technology shares in gasoline, Goldman Sachs has been manufacturing all the manipulations of the market since the Great Depression - and it's about to start again.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a formidable vampire octopus wrapped around humanity, relentlessly driving its sucker wherever there is money. In fact, the story of the recent financial crisis, which is also the story of the fall of the ruined US empire by crooks, reads like the Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
Today, most of us know the main actors. As George Bush's last finance minister, Goldman's former CEO Henri Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a shady plan to divert trillions of YOUR dollars to a handful of his old Wall Street mates. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former finance minister, spent 26 at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup Bank, which in turn received Paulson 300 billions of dollars in public money. There is John Thain, that bastard Merryl Lynch's boss, who offered 87.000 $ a rug for his office as his company imploded. A former Goldman, Thain benefited from a multi-billion dollar donation from Paulson, who also used billions of public money to help Bank of America save the stricken company in Thain. There is Robert Steel, formerly of Goldman and boss of Wachovia, who granted himself 225 million dollars of golden parachutes, for him and his executives, while his bank was self-destructive. There is Joshua Bolten, Bush's cabinet director during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, finance officer in Bush's cabinet, who was still a lobbyist for Goldman a year before. And Ed Liddy, a former Goldman director Paulson has charged the bailout of insurance giant AIG [1]. After Liddy's arrival, AIG paid 13 Billion Dollars to Goldman. Canadian and Italian central bank directors are Goldman alumni, as are the director of the World Bank, the director of the New York Stock Exchange [2], the last two directors of the New York Federal Reserve - which is, by the way, now in charge of Goldman's control - not to mention ...
But any attempt to build narrative around all the Goldman alumni who hold influential positions becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, much like trying to list all things on Earth. What you need to see is the big picture: If America is sucked by a siphon, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that siphon - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the Western capitalist system, which never predicted that in a society that is passively governed by the free market and free elections, organized rapacity always wins over disorganized democracy.
The bank's unprecedented power and power allowed it to turn America into a giant money pump, handling entire economic sectors for years, moving its pawns when one market collapses, and all the time. bursting with hidden costs that shatter families everywhere - oil prices, consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, massive layoffs, future taxes to pay back the bailouts. All that money you lose, he goes somewhere and, literally and figuratively, he goes to Goldman Sachs. This bank is a huge, highly sophisticated machine for converting useful wealth into the least useful, most wasteful substance - the pure profit of already rich individuals.
They realize this by using the same protocol again and again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman places himself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know to be shit. They then seek vast sums from the middle and lower classes of society, with the help of an invalid and corrupt state that allows them to rewrite the rules in exchange for a few tips that the bank throws at the politicians. In the end, when the bubble bursts, leaving millions of ordinary citizens on the floor, they start the whole process again, coming to our rescue to lend us our own money with interest, while presenting themselves as disinterested men, just a gang. classy guys who are there to help the machine spin. They have been doing the same thing over and over since the 1920 years - and today they are preparing to do it again by creating what might be the biggest and most impudent bubble of all time.
If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you first have to understand where all the money went - and to understand that, you have to understand how Goldman fought in the past. It's a long story of exactly five bubbles - including the peak of oil prices last year, strange and seemingly inexplicable. There were many losers in each of these bubbles, as well as in the bailout that followed. But Goldman was not among them.