Evil Syndicated

[Crewleader]

By James Howard Kunstler
on July 27, 2009 11:00 AM



By now, everyone in that fraction of the world that pays attention to something other than American Idol and their platter of TGI Friday's loaded potato skins knows that Goldman Sachs has been caught at another racket in the stock market: front-running trades. What a clever gambit, done with the help of the markets themselves - the Nasdaq in particular - in which information on trades is held back a fraction of a second from public view, while the data is shoveled to the computers of privileged subscribers who can execute zillions of programmed micro-trades before the rest of the herd makes a move. This allows them to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing absolutely nothing of value. The old-fashioned method used by brokers was called "churning," in which stocks were bought and sold incessantly (by phone) from the portfolios of inattentive clients merely to generate commissions. In any sensible society - i.e. a society with an instinct for self-preservation - it would be against the law and the people doing it would be sent to prison.

I'm not a lawyer, but I've got to think that the actions at the Nasdaq end - shoveling the data to the privileged subscribers a fraction of a second early - is patently illegal in the first place, since the whole purpose of an exchange is to create a fair trading space. Where both parties are concerned, it should amount to a plain vanilla criminal conspiracy to commit stock trading fraud. Maybe the larger question is: since when did we become a society lacking the instinct for self-preservation - that is, a society bent on suicide? Or maybe the question is better put to Goldman Sachs's CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Since this racket was made public, there has been chatter all over the Web about how angry the American public is about Wall Street in general, and increasingly about Goldman Sachs in particular. Nobody has summed it up better than Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, calling the company "...a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." And Taibbi's fierce article about Goldman Sachs came out weeks before this latest outrage. As we turn the corner toward autumn, President Obama looks increasingly like a dupe, a tool, or a co-conspirator of Goldman Sachs. If he doesn't instruct the Justice Department to commence investigations of the company, and if he doesn't dissociate himself from their alumni hanging around the White House, the Treasury Department, and elsewhere in the government, he's going to become the object of an awful public wrath. Obama has no other choice at this point except to clean house - to fire Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and all other former Goldman Sachs employees in positions of power and influence around him.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/07/evil-syndicated.html#more

[The Magistrate]

1. The Gentleman Makes Some Sound Points, Ma'am

[notesdev]

2. Enthusiastically seconded

"Obama has no other choice at this point except to clean house - to fire Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and all other former Goldman Sachs employees in positions of power and influence around him."

You bet!!

[unlawflcombatnt]

4. Another Good Quote from the article

"At this point, it even begins to look as though Mr. Obama is taking cover behind the health care reform debate to avoid answering for his government's association with Goldman Sachs."

It certainly does seem like the health care debate is providing cover for Goldman's thievery.

[GoesTo11]

5. If Bush could sell Ken Lay down the river, how much more so

should Obama do what's right and take on GS.

[earth mom]

3. The United States of Goldman Sachs. That's what this country is.

:puke: