Goldman Sach records 63 continuous days of trading profit

[Cry Havoc]

http://theweek.com/article/index/202836/goldmans-suspiciously-perfect-63day-trading-run

In a disclosure destined to focus more unwanted attention on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs reported Monday that its traders made money on all 63 trading days of the first quarter of 2010 — the first perfect quarter in Goldman's history. But with the Wall Street giant already facing government action for allegedly defrauding investors, the news threatens to "exacerbate criticism that Goldman has an unfair advantage in the markets." A Goldman spokesman says the stellar quarter simply proves the firm is good at assessing risks. Is Goldman playing fair?

Clearly, Goldman's cheating: Sure, Goldman has "plenty of exceptionally talented people," says Larry Doyle in Daily Markets, but it's galling for the firm to attribute its astounding success primarily to trading skill. In fact, Wall Street has become an oligopoly where Goldman and other giant institutions "control, if not outright manipulate, prices." It's even worse than Vegas, where the house is humble enough to take an occassional loss.
"Goldman's perfect quarter indicates game is fixed"

Goldman's just good at what it does: The fact is that investors depend on Goldman's "strength and intuition," says Don Vialoux in Canada's National Post. So when Goldman says buy, people buy. When Goldman does well, investors feel more confident, and they buy even more. So don't curse the firm's success — as Goldman goes, so goes the market.
"As Goldman Sachs goes, so goes the market"

No matter why it happened, this could hurt Goldman: "It's growing tough for Goldman to convince a jaundiced public it isn't unfairly benefiting at the expense of others," says Liz Moyer in Forbes. Not only did it make money on every trading day, but it made $75 million or more on 51 of those 63 days. That kind of consistency defies belief, so no matter how it happened, Goldman's "slam dunk" quarter could just hurt its already "tarnished public image."
"Will Goldman's perfect quarter hurt them?"

[Winehole23]

Amazing.

Are there any statisticians out there? What's the sigma on this?

[boutons_deux]

3 other banks did the same.

http://spurstalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4341082&postcount=60

It's a huge fraud. These may have trading profits, but they still have not "owned" and accounted for their toxic garbage.

These corporate "persons", unlike human persons the very same banks drive into bankruptcy and poverty, are allowed to have postive financial reputation only because the taxpayers bailed them out from sure bankruptcy, and allowed to move their toxicities off their books, much like Goldman hid Greece's debt, until it came due.

The whole fucking country is one big fraud.

[Winehole23]

Backstopping private risk was an epochal mistake. The genie's out of the bottle now...

[boutons_deux]

AlterNet

Exposing the Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Makes Money Out of Thin Air


By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on May 12, 2010, Printed on May 12, 2010

For some, the Federal Reserve is the right place to house any new regulatory powers contained in financial reform legislation. For others, the Fed is at the center of all that ails us. In fact, over 95,000 have signed a petition at auditthefed.com.

"In a major victory for transparency at the Federal Reserve, the Senate passed on Tuesday an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders that directs the Government Accountability Office to conduct a top-to-bottom audit of all emergency actions by the Fed since the start of the financial crisis in 2007. In addition to the audit, the Fed for the first time would have to reveal by Dec.1, 2010, the identities of banks and other financial institutions that took more than $2 trillion in nearly zero-interest loans." -- from the office of Sen. Sanders, 05/11/10

...

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146829

========

I just know that we'll never learn the real identities of the bailout beneficiaries, nor exactly, or even approximately, how much they received.

And even if we did, the Exec and Legislature, owned by the corps and capitalists, would do nothing about it, apart from fraudulent window dressing "corrections".

The US is a fraud, and a totally fucked fraud, at least the lower 95% is fucked.

[Winehole23]

My understanding was that there would be transparency on the TARP, but on nothing else. Did I read your post wrong?

[Wild Cobra]

Amazing.

Are there any statisticians out there? What's the sigma on this?
I forget completely how Sigma works, but it's probably a 5 or 6. Maybe higher.

[Wild Cobra]

My understanding was that there would be transparency on the TARP, but on nothing else. Did I read your post wrong?
Conservative radio has talked about these large players getting very low interest loans, and loaning out a a far higher percentage. That could be it. Our tax dollars at work.

[Nbadan]

just know that we'll never learn the real identities of the bailout beneficiaries, nor exactly, or even approximately, how much they received.

And even if we did, the Exec and Legislature, owned by the corps and capitalists, would do nothing about it, apart from fraudulent window dressing "corrections".

Exactly. Just like we never learned the identities of the investors who bought all the United and American Airline short options immediately prior to 9/11...40 million of which was never collected..

[Winehole23]

Goldman Sachs makes more money from trading than any other Wall Street firm. In the first quarter, the bank’s $7.39 billion in revenue (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=GS%3AUS) from trading fixed-income, currencies and commodities dwarfed the $5.52 billion made by its closest rival, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp. (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=BAC%3AUS) In equities, Goldman Sachs’s $2.35 billion in revenue was about 50 percent higher than its nearest competitor.



Cohn (http://search.bloomberg.com/search?q=Cohn&site=wnews&client=wnews&proxystylesheet=wnews&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=p&getfields=wnnis&sort=date:D:S:d1) told investors at a May 11 conference in New York that the firm lost money on only 11 days in the last 12 months. He said that uncanny streak of success refutes suspicions that the bank depends on proprietary bets with its own money.



“It is implausible that a proprietary-driven business model could be right 96 percent of the time,” Cohn said. Instead, he said the “simple answer” is that the firm makes money by capturing bid-offer spreads when acting as an intermediary for client trades.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aq1TZHxNGpWU&pos=3

[DarrinS]

All the President's Goldman Sachs Men

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/21/all_the_presidents_goldman_sachs_men_105251.html




While President Obama assails the culture of greed and recklessness practiced by the men of Goldman Sachs, his administration is infested with them. The White House can no more disown Government Sachs than Da Boss-in-chief can disown Chicago politics.

Obama is headed to Wall Street on Thursday to demand "financial regulatory reform" -- just as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has filed civil suit against Goldman Sachs for mortgage-related fraud. Question the timing? Darn tootin'. There are no coincidences in the perpetually orchestrated Age of O. Everyone from disgraced former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to analysts at the Brookings Institution and Barclays Capital to the GOP leadership and Rush Limbaugh has noted the reeking political opportunism in the air.

As the New York Post reported Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee immediately bought sponsored Internet ads on Google that direct web surfers who type in "Goldman Sachs SEC" to Obama's fundraising site. "It's time to hold the big banks accountable," the money-grubbing DNC message bellows. But just like his crony capitalist predecessor George W. Bush, Obama has relied on Goldman Sachs and Wall Street power brokers to engineer massive government interventions to "rescue" failing businesses with the tax dollars of ordinary Americans.

While irony-challenged Democratic candidates like mob-linked banker Alexi Giannoulias in Illinois (who hopes to fill Obama's old Senate seat) call on Republicans to return their fat-cat Goldman Sachs donations, the Democrats are silent on the $994,795 in Goldman Sachs campaign cash that Obama bagged. The class-warfare Dems are also mum on all the president's Goldman Sachs men sitting in the catbird's seat:

-- Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama's Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. He was confirmed despite heated congressional grilling over his role, as Reuters described it, "as a high-level Treasury official in a 2000 law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight. The financial instruments have been blamed for amplifying global financial turmoil." Gensler said he was sorry -- hey, it worked for tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner -- and was quickly installed to guard the henhouse.

-- Goldman Sachs kept White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on a $3,000 monthly retainer while he worked as Clinton's chief fundraiser, as first reported by Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney. The financial titans threw in another $50,000 to become the Clinton primary campaign's top funder. Emanuel received nearly $80,000 in cash from Goldman Sachs during his four terms in Congress -- investments that have reaped untold rewards, as Emanuel assumed a leading role championing the trillion-dollar TARP banking bailout law.

-- Former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson serves under Geithner as his top deputy and overseer of TARP bailout -- $10 billion of which went to Goldman Sachs. Left-leaning government watchdog Melanie Sloan of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington responded: "It makes it appear that they are saying one thing and doing another." Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation noted that, while at Goldman Sachs, Patterson lobbied against executive pay limits that Obama had crusaded for as senator (before, that is, his administration carved out exemptions for AIG). While Patterson agreed to recuse himself on any Goldman Sachs-related issues or related policy concerns, Blumenthal wrote, it "still creates a serious conflict for Geithner, as Treasury is being partly managed by a former Goldman lobbyist. Geithner is also placed in a tough position considering that his chief of staff is limited in the areas in which he can work (supposedly)."

-- Obama's close hometown crony, campaign finance chief and senior adviser Penny Pritzker was head of Superior Bank of Chicago, a subprime specialist that went bust in 2001, leaving more than 1,400 people stripped of their savings after bank officials falsified profit reports. Pritzker's lawyer at O'Melveny and Myers, Tom Donilon, is now Obama's deputy national security adviser. He earned just shy of $4 million representing her and other high-profile meltdown clients including Goldman Sachs.

-- White House National Economic Council head Larry Summers reaped nearly $2.8 million in speaking fees from many of the major financial institutions and government bailout recipients he now polices, including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. A single speech to Goldman Sachs in April 2008 brought in $135,000. Summers has prior experience negotiating government-sponsored bailouts that benefit private concerns. In 1995, he spearheaded a $40 billion Mexican peso bailout that bypassed Congress. Summers personally leaned on the International Monetary Fund to provide nearly $18 billion for the package. Summers' boss, then Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, was former co-chairman of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs -- the Mexican government's investment banking firm of choice.

Rubin continues to mentor another former employee of his with regular visits and chats -- Treasury Secretary Geithner, who as head of the New York Federal Reserve pushed bailed-out insurance conglomerate AIG to cover up sweetheart deals for investment banks that benefited, you guessed it, Goldman Sachs.

As Obama harangues Wall Street to clean up its house, all the president's Goldman Sachs men have their feet on the coffee table at his.

[z0sa]

That's an interesting article, and further proves that Big Business $$ is what makes the nation run, regardless of political affiliation.

[boutons_deux]

America is a huge fraud, an ersatz, made-for-TV country, top to bottom, coast-to-coast.

[Winehole23]

All the President's Goldman Sachs Men


-- Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama's Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. He was confirmed despite heated congressional grilling over his role, as Reuters described it, "as a high-level Treasury official in a 2000 law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight. The financial instruments have been blamed for amplifying global financial turmoil." Gensler said he was sorry -- hey, it worked for tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner -- and was quickly installed to guard the henhouse.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/21/all_the_presidents_goldman_sachs_men_105251.htmlNo w SEC Chief.


Gensler will lead work on sweeping new federal regulations that would require companies to disclose their contributions and exposure to climate change, which is poised to trigger a huge lobbying fight and is already stirring deep partisan tensions. The effort will be in focus next week when President Joe Biden holds an international climate summit.



And following four years of light-touch regulation under Trump, Democrats are urging the SEC to step up oversight of major financial firms after a series of high-profile market snafus this year. In recent days, for example, international banks with operations in the U.S. suffered billions of dollars in losses after a little-known investment fund collapsed and sent shockwaves through the markets.

"Constant attempts by some of the industry to evade rules and regulations and a level playing field are in for a rude awakening from a Gary Gensler SEC," said Better Markets President and CEO Dennis Kelleher, who served with Gensler on Biden's presidential transition review team.https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/14/gary-gensler-confirmed-sec-481474

[boutons_deux]

IBIWISI

[Winehole23]

1150809479190962176

https://x.com/RudyHavenstein/status/1150809479190962176

[SnakeBoy]

1150809479190962176

https://x.com/RudyHavenstein/status/1150809479190962176

What's your complaint WH?

[Winehole23]

What's your complaint WH?was a rather obvious conflict of interest, but it's symptomatic of the rot in the banking system. the people who are supposed to police the banks are too conflicted to do it.

[Winehole23]

People forget (or maybe never knew in the first place) that the hedge fund/non-bank bailout happened totally behind the scenes in 2008. Before TARP, before the nearly trillion dollar Obama bailout, systemically important firms were favored to continue to be TBTF market-makers for an insolvent asset-class that just wrecked the global economy. Stuff like market makers ad hoc getting paid 100 cents on the dollar for by then worthless AIG warrants after the sudden demise of Lehman Bros was an early indicator the USG had its thumb on the scale for TBTF parties.

And vice versa: Citigroup basically vetted Obama's cabinet in 2008-9.

"Rudy Havenstein" argues there was another financial coup in 2019 when the repo market went haywire. Not sure what happened there, but the dollar amounts for a short period were impressive --



The dollar amounts of the Fed’s emergency repo loans (https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/11/the-u-s-treasurys-financial-crisis-warning-bell-didnt-ring-before-the-repo-crisis-of-2019-or-this-years-bank-runs/) grew to staggering levels. On October 24, 2019, we reported the following:

“The New York Fed will now be lavishing up to $120 billion a day in cheap overnight loans to Wall Street securities trading firms, a daily increase of $45 billion from its previously announced $75 billion a day. In addition, it is increasing its 14-day term loans to Wall Street, a program which also came out of the blue in September, to $45 billion. Those term loans since September have been occurring twice a week, meaning another $90 billion a week will be offered, bringing the total weekly offering to an astounding $690 billion. It should be noted that if the same Wall Street firms are getting these loans continuously rolled over, they are effectively permanent loans.

(That’s exactly what happened during the 2007-2010 Wall Street collapse: some teetering Wall Street casinos received, individually, $2 trillion in cumulative loans that were rolled over for two and one-half years – without the authorization or even awareness of Congress or the American people. One bank, Citigroup, received over $2.5 trillion in Fed loans, much of them at an interest rate below 1 percent, at a time when it was insolvent and couldn’t have obtained loans in the open market at even high double-digit interest rates.)”

The Fed’s emergency repo loan program lasted from September 17, 2019 until July 2, 2020


Havenstein counts CARES ACT as a third financial coup (BlackRock as CARES ACT administrator of Fed lending facilities, really?). On the one hand, how can it have been a coup when so few people noticed -- all three times?

On the other, what corner of the MSM is more neglected or less well understood than financial sector reporting? Basically, what seems to be happening behind the scenes is that an artifact of a Fed lending facility has replaced LIBOR as an international benchmark and that one-time emergency funding becomes ongoing.

1732157468665348363https://x.com/TheBondFreak/status/1732157468665348363

[Winehole23]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GRhrsc_WUAERyW6?format=jpg&name=medium

[SnakeBoy]

was a rather obvious conflict of interest, but it's symptomatic of the rot in the banking system. the people who are supposed to police the banks are too conflicted to do it.

He had a gubmint waiver so no conflict at all.