LAST YEAR, Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi wrote a damning exposé of mega-bank Goldman Sachs that began by describing the Wall Street giant as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
It's an apt description and one we quoted more than once at SocialistWorker.org. Goldman Sachs helped inflate the housing bubble of the 2000s in order to keep the Wall Street casino going strong. It hyped investments based on pooling huge numbers of mortgage loans...and it provided other "opportunities" for investors to gamble that the same mortgages would go bad. And whatever the investment, Goldman Sachs executives were there with their hands out, raking in fees from every deal. Then, when the housing bubble burst--and in the process pushed the world financial system to the brink of a meltdown--Goldman unerringly aimed its blood funnel at another huge pot of money: the U.S. Treasury...
But a year has passed since Taibbi wrote his article, and based on what we've learned since, it's worth asking: Was comparing Goldman Sachs to a vampire squid too generous? Is Matt Taibbi, in fact, guilty of insulting vampire squids?
For example, earlier this year, Congress investigated a scam from a few years ago in which Goldman created a security that was designed to fail--anyone who invested in it lost their money. Why was it designed to fail? So hedge fund boss John Paulson could place a financial bet that the security would, in fact, default. Paulson made a cool $1 billion on a sure thing--and, once again, Goldman pocketed big fees for setting it all up. And now, more details are emerging about a Goldman Sachs plot that wreaked deadly havoc around the world--speculation on food commodities...The banksters knew that if their schemes went exactly according to plan, millions of people would lose their homes, and hundreds of millions would go hungry. But there was money to be made--so Goldman pulled the trigger...
http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/05/banking-on-hunger
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