goldman sachs

The Washington Times published an op-ed by Capital Research Center president Terrence Scanlon titled “Obama’s Goldman Game.”

Here’s the top of the article:

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, the left’s favorite bank, are more than a little suspect – but not for the reasons you might expect.

It’s unclear what will happen with the case, involving an exotic investment gone bad, but at the same time, it’s clear that the unveiling of the civil action just happened to coincide with President Obama’s declaration of war on Wall Street.

There are other unusual “coincidences,” too.

Evidence has surfaced that as Goldman’s attorneys tried to cut a deal with the SEC over the potential charges, Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein visited the Obama White House at least four times.

The decision whether to sue the bank was so controversial within the SEC that members split 3 to 2 on filing the lawsuit. Chairman Mary Schapiro, an Obama appointee, and the two Democrats on the commission voted yes, while the two Republicans voted no.

Add to this that Goldman just hired former Obama White House counsel Gregory B. Craig, the lawyer who helped President Clinton send 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez back to communist Cuba a decade ago.

Then factor in that Goldman is a creature of the political left and a natural ally of the Democratic Party. It is a big-government lovers’ bank that despises the unbridled competition of laissez-faire capitalism. Akin to Fannie Mae in that it generates private profits but forces taxpayers to cover its losses, Goldman loves bailouts and feeding at the public trough.

Former Goldman employees – including Henry Paulson, President George W. Bush’s liberal, tree-hugging Treasury secretary – designed the $700-billion-plus “mother of all bailouts” in 2008 and then promptly steered $10 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the bank. Goldman veteran Neel Kashkari oversaw the doling out of bailout funds.

Goldman funds the left almost exclusively, so, as the left likes to say, follow the money. [...]

“What’s bad for America is good for Goldman Sachs,” writes Terry Keenan, anchor of “Cashin’ In,” a Fox News Channel show about investing.

The bank makes big money selling and trading federal, state, and local debt and as one of the largest primary dealers in U.S. Treasurys it “has a huge vested interest in the United States digging a deeper and deeper hole.” Goldman forecasts the U.S. will borrow a record $3.25 trillion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, which is quadruple the total borrowed last year, Keenan writes in a New York Post op-ed.

Its biggest competitors in the debt world, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, are gone, leaving Goldman as the “major toll collector on Washington’s red-ink railroad,” she writes. “To put it bluntly, Goldman Sachs is a play on the bankrupting of America – the more we borrow, the more they make.”

John Berlau, who directs the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a great op-ed on Henry Paulson, President Bush’s disastrous Treasury Secretary.

It begins:

As much as President Obama is criticized, legitimately, for federal meddling in business and dictating who should serve on the auto industry boards, conservatives and others must never forget that it was Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that made the federal government go where it had never gone before in its dealing with private corporations. It was heartening that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has now held a bipartisan hearing in which Paulson was at last held to some account.

The fact is, Paulson exceeded his authority as Treasury Secretary on numerous occasions. When the government took over AIG in September, longtime company leader Hank Greenberg was locked out of negotiations, and Paulson replaced AIG’s CEO with Edward Liddy, who Paulson served with on the board of Goldman Sachs when Paulson was CEO.

[...] Paulson strongly pressured healthy banks to take government money and give the government ownership stakes in the institutions, implicitly threatening negative regulatory actions if they didn’t take the deal. [...]

But the most disturbing allegation is the one that the committee explored regarding Paulson and others including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke pressuring the Bank of America CEO to deceive his shareholders and not report the extent of losses at Merrill Lynch at the time BofA was considering acquiring it. [...]

Fascist Henry “Hank” Paulson, Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, is scheduled to testify before a congressional committee tomorrow about the threats he made to Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, Bloomberg reports.

It should be interesting watching Paulson squirm.

The economy-destroying cap-and-trade bill, which would impose a massive, regressive energy tax on Americans, is going to be voted on by the House of Representatives soon.

Visions of dollar signs are dancing in the heads of Al Gore, Goldman Sachs, and General Electric right now as they prepare to enrich themselves at the expense of the public interest.

It is a travesty. It is insanity. It will kill countless American jobs and help the federal government run every aspect of Americans’ lives. Anyone who sells carbon permits (assuming those provisions are still in the bill) under it should be sued for fraud.

God help us if it passes.

                                Shopping in Weimar Germany circa 1923

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Bloomberg quoted Goldman Sachs saying late last month that the U.S. government would have to sell $3.25 trillion (with a T!) in debt this fiscal year in order to meet its obligations:

Obama has increased the U.S. marketable debt to an unprecedented $6.36 trillion to fund bank bailouts, stimulus spending and the budget deficit. The government will have to sell a record $3.25 trillion of Treasuries in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the 16 primary dealers required to bid at Treasury debt auctions.

A massive increase in the money supply will wreak havoc. We are so screwed.

Danish enviro-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg had an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

He’s right to say that much of corporate America is pushing for draconian carbon emission controls because visions of dollar signs are dancing in their heads. They are more than happy to eat U.S. tax dollars in order to supposedly save the planet.

I would go farther than that. I would say that they are recklessly indifferent to whether the new energy taxes they support –whether they be direct (carbon taxes) or hidden (cap and trade)– will harm America.

We’ve been following the destructive lobbying of U.S. big businesses on this issue for some time.

Timothy P. Carney profiled the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) for us in the June 2008 edition of Organization Trends. Fred Lucas detailed the efforts by Al Gore to feed the global warming hysteria in the August 2008 Foundation Watch and also looked at the efforts by Goldman Sachs to cash in on that hysteria in the October Foundation Watch. In the August 2007 Foundation Watch Deborah Corey Barnes spotlighted Al Gore’s environmental scaremongering business.

General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, a left-wing panderer who has presided over his company’s decline in recent years, says the economy-killing cap-and-trade system of trading emission permits is the best way to crack down on carbon emissions, Jeff Poor of NewsBusters writes.

And Immelt seems to be using his company’s media conglomerate NBC Universal, which owns media outlets NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, to promote GE’s financial interest in regulating carbon.

GE is also a major player in the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), which Timothy P. Carney profiled for Capital Research Center last year in the June 2008 Organization Trends. USCAP is also pushing for cap-and-trade.

So is Goldman Sachs , which along with Al Gore, will rake in incomprehensibly huge sums of money from carbon trading.

Neel Kashkari, the holdover from the Bush administration who is running the Wall Street bailout program (TARP), is unable to be effective in his job because it’s known that he’ll be leaving it soon, the Washington Post reports.

Reporter Daniel Wagner writes

Perhaps Treasury’s highest-profile effort — its management of the $700 billion financial system bailout – is still led by Neel Kashkari, a Bush administration holdover who officials said is on his way out.

[Former Bush Treasury spokesman Tony] Fratto said that makes it impossible for Kashkari to engage in real negotiations with banks. He said the bailout has been hurt by “uncertainty over what the policy is, the details, whether they’re going to stick, whether the programs are going to change again — and these are all things that Neel probably can’t answer for them, and no one can answer for them.”

So TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) is moving slowly. That’s probably a good thing for America.

As policymakers here in America ponder adopting a disastrous so-called cap-and-trade system that will do little but fatten the wallets of Goldman Sachs, Hot Air reports that carbon trading markets in the European Union are in freefall.

There’s something sweetly surreal about it: an artificial market in a non-commodity is collapsing. It serves them right.