Posts Tagged ‘Goldman-Sachs’
August 23rd, 2011 by John Feehery
Muammar Gaddafi
If and when Muammar Gaddafi is finally deposed in Libya, President Obama probably deserves some credit. He backed Nicholas Sarkozy and NATO’s efforts to aid the rebels (whoever they are). He authorized the Navy and the Air Force to bomb the hell out of the bad guys. And of course, he has been boldly predicting that Gaddafi’s days are numbered, a nice counter-balance to the Libyan dictator’s assurances that he was going nowhere.
Will Obama get that credit? Probably not.
Most Americans don’t care what happens to Mr. Gaddafi. They are worried less about the economic future of Tripoli and more worried about jobs in their own community. Why should we spend our hard-earned tax dollars deposing a far-away dictator when we have a huge budget deficit and a struggling economy back here?
For the conspiracy theorists out there, there is a persistent rumor that we went into Libya to bailout Goldman Sachs.
Goldman lost 98% of Libya’s Sovereign Wealth Fund in 2007 (which amounted to $1.3 billion, a lot of it personal Gaddafi money, undoubtedly), and the Libyans were not very happy about it. Goldman could never come up with a solution to this problem that could make the dictator happy. Read more...
Tags: America, Assad, Barack Obama, Economy, Goldman-Sachs, Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, NATO, Nicholas Sarkozy, Obama, Politics, spending, Syria, Tripoli, Wall Street Journal, war, Zarti
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, Foreign Relations, Government, History, Media, Politics, Scandals, Theory, bad news, national security, spending, taxes, war | 1 Comment »
May 18th, 2010 by John Feehery
Enron Complex / Photo credit: Alex (http://budurl.com/nwem)
Originally posted at http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/98251-no-cash-no-campaigns
It has become an almost weekly ritual, especially in the Age of Obama.
A major corporation, let’s say Goldman Sachs or British Petroleum, or in days past, Enron or Halliburton, gets into some hot water politically.
The inevitable committee hearings are called, and the major executives of said corporations are brought before the assorted members of Congress and publicly flogged to the satisfaction of the representatives’ staffs and family members and to the titillation of national media.
And as the flogging commences, inevitably, the congressional committees of one side or the other publicly demand representatives return the campaign contributions from the corporations that were publicly flogged.
This same thing happens when a member of Congress gets into legal trouble. It happened to Tom DeLay, to Mark Foley, and to Charlie Rangel and John Murtha. The money they gave to their colleagues is suddenly tainted and must be returned — or else.
The irony is that the campaign committees, usually the ones who are calling for the campaign money to be returned, wouldn’t survive without these campaign contributions. Read more...
Tags: Barack Obama, campaign, campaign contributions, Charlie Rangel, Congress, election, Enron, Goldman-Sachs, Government, Halliburton, John Murtha, Mark Foley, PAC, senators, Tom DeLay
Posted in Fundraising, Government, Politics, Theory, election | No Comments »
May 5th, 2010 by John Feehery
It was Lenin who said: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
A Washington corollary might be: “The Capitalists will give us the campaign contributions from which we will hang them.”
The headline in one of the newspaper articles brought that thought to my mind: “Obama biggest recipient of BP campaign contributions.”
British Petroleum gave more money to Barack Obama than to any other candidate in the last election. Obama’s spokesman, Mr. Gibbs, said that the President is going to keep the Administration’s boot on the throat of BP, paraphrasing his Interior Secretary.
I didn’t realize that the Administration had a boot nor did I realize that BP had a throat. Sounds kind of kinky to me. But I digress.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Administration was filing criminal charges and civil charges against Goldman-Sachs, the erstwhile and formerly very powerful investment bank.
Goldman is charged with the high crime of making a lot of money at the expense of a lot of suckers. That they didn’t tell the suckers that they were suckers seems to be the chief of allegation against them. Read more...
Tags: BP, Capitalism, Goldman-Sachs, Obama, Presidential election
Posted in Capitalism, Fundraising, Government, Politics | 2 Comments »
April 28th, 2010 by John Feehery
Martin Michael Lomasney, a Boston politician from the 19th Century, once said: “”Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”
Being from Chicago, I was taught that lesson by more a few political types. The Washington corollary to that admonition is: “Never write down anything that you wouldn’t be happy to see on the front page of the Washington Post.”
I bet you that the fabulous Fab, the Goldman Sachs wunderkind, Fabrice Tourre, wish he would have remembered those golden nuggets of advice.
It was the fabulous Fab who wrote in an email: “The whole building is about to collapse any time now. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab . . . standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”
That Fab is a cad goes without doubt.
But he isn’t the only one who failed to heed the advice of fabulous Martin Michael Lomasney.
Think of Tiger Woods. If he wasn’t text crazy, there would be no reason for his wife Elin to beat him with a seven iron, because Elin would have been none the wiser. No text, no bruise, no crash, no rehab, no problem. Read more...
Tags: CDO, Economy, Fabrice Tourre, Fabulous Fab, Goldman-Sachs, Jack Abramoff, Justice Department, Martin Michael Lomasney, tiger woods
Posted in Financial Crisis, Politics, Theory, corruption | No Comments »
April 19th, 2010 by John Feehery
It used to be said that what is good for General Motors is good for America.
And for much of the last century, that assertion was basically true. Economic policies that helped make General Motors the number one car maker in the world were also good for the country.
That wasn’t just because of some broad economic theories on taxes, regulation and labor management either. GM itself played a central and stabilizing role in American society. It provided health care and economic security for hundreds of thousands of American workers, many of whom were blue-collar workers and didn’t have too many other job prospects outside of the auto industry. GM also promoted American power and American ingenuity across the globe, spreading the myth of American supremacy in far-reaches of the earth.
As we all know, General Motors fell on hard times, as it had trouble competing with foreign automakers. Things got so bad, GM last year was actually taken over the by the U.S. government, giving a new spin to the idea that what is good for GM is good for America. Read more...
Tags: Bailout, General Motors, Goldman-Sachs, Hank Paulson, Morgan Stanley, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Posted in Bailouts, Financial Crisis, Government, Politics, Theory, spending | No Comments »
April 16th, 2010 by John Feehery
The American people don’t like bailouts, unless it is they themselves who are getting bailed out. And even then, being bailed out leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth.
TARP has popularly been described as a bailout, and maybe it was. But without TARP, the financial system would have completely crashed, and believe me, millions of Americans would have come to the government, asking for their own personal bailout.
America, as a society, has been over-leveraged. The federal government is over-leveraged. Investment houses were over-leveraged. Most consumers were over-leveraged.
What does that mean? It means they were buying stuff that they couldn’t afford. The government was buying a prescription drug bill, two wars, and a bunch of other stuff, including now a new health care bill, without either getting more revenue or cutting spending elsewhere.
Investment houses were making huge bets with little money to back up the bets. And they were betting that the housing market would continue to rise for the rest of history. In some cases, these smart investors were betting 40 bucks for every one dollar they had in the bank. And they were making stupid bets. These are the geniuses that we entrust with all of our pension funds and retirement savings. Read more...
Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Bailout, bankruptcy, banks, Chuck Schumer, Economy, Federal Reserve, Goldman-Sachs, Hank Paulsen, Michael Lewis, Rahm Emanual, spending, TARP, Wall Street
Posted in Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, Theory, spending | No Comments »
April 5th, 2010 by John Feehery
One of the great things about going on a vacation is that you get the chance to catch up on some reading. For some reason, I picked Michael Lewis’s book, “The Big Short”, and Hank Paulson’s “On the Brink” for my light reading.
Lewis, of course, is an easy read, but not a light read. If you want to get your blood pressure sky-rocketing, read this book.
It basically a story about how Wall Street screwed America.
The villains, in order of calumny: Read more...
- The ratings agencies and their second-class employees. If you really want to know why we had this huge problem with sub-prime loans, you can find the chief antagonists in those agencies, like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, who decided, somehow, that it was smart policy to give a AAA rating (the strongest rating) to a bunch of bonds that weren’t worth the paper they were written on. The theory used by these second-rate financial analysts was that most people were going to pay back their mortgage loans. And that might be true in most cases. But in the case of subprime loans, when most of those loans were given to people who didn’t have much of a track-record or the ability to pay them back, that was not the case. The ratings agencies refused to distinguish between the two and now we are all paying the price.
Tags: Book Review, Goldman-Sachs, Michael Lewis, middle class, The Big Sort, Wall Street
Posted in Book Review, Financial Crisis, Government, Politics, Theory | 2 Comments »
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