Tag Archives: Merrill Lynch

Michael Snyder ~ Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Are Pulling The Strings

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Govt Slaves | January 29 2013

Does a shadowy group of obscenely wealthy elitists control the world?

Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes?

The answer might surprise you.  Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control.

And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings.  When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people that have a few million dollars.  As you will see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year and still be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt.

That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible.  Under this ne0-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments.  Just look around – everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier.  But the ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on all of that wealth.  They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations.

The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet.  They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line.  They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system.  They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world.  It is just that most people don’t want to admit the truth.

The ultra-wealthy don’t run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do.  Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won’t be taxed such as the Cayman Islands.  According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.

U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn’t hit 32 trillion dollars.

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Matt Taibbi ~ More Secrets And Lies Of The Bailout

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Reader Supported News | January 9 2013

matt_taibbi3Opinion ~ I have a feature in the new issue of Rolling Stone called “Secrets and Lies of the Bailout,” which focuses in large part on the seemingly intentional policy of deception in the government’s rescue of the financial sector. The government didn’t just bail out Wall Street with money: It also lied on Wall Street’s behalf, calling unhealthy banks healthy, and helping banks cover up just how much aid they were getting in secret.

Proponents of the bailouts will say that whatever the government did, it worked. The economy didn’t collapse as it appeared it might in late 2008, and the stock markets are puffed up all over again, as financial companies in particular are back making huge profits.

But in the course of researching the magazine piece, we discovered definite victims of the myriad deceptions that became a baked-in feature of the bailouts. One of those victims was a southern investment broker who lost lots of his own money, lost money for family members who’d invested with him, and (maybe worst of all) lost plenty of his clients’ money, when he made investment decisions based on what turned out to be incomplete information.

If this particular broker had known exactly how far the bailouts reached, neither he nor his clients would ever have lost so much. But during the crisis it was decided, by people deemed more important than small-town investment advisers and their clients, that the full story of the bailouts didn’t need to be told.

As a result, George Hartzman and his clients got creamed. In recent years we’ve heard a lot about how the bailouts saved the world. This is the other side of the story.

George Hartzman is easy to like. The easygoing North Carolinian has every salesman’s ability to grab you from the first moment with humor and charm, but what makes him a little bit of a different kind of cat – and I suspect some of this change developed after he joined the growing population of financial crisis-era whistleblowers, dismissed from a Wells Fargo brokerage after making complaints about what he felt were bailout-related abuses – is that the humor is often self-directed. He loves to tell stories about all the goofy, sometimes-dicey sales jobs he’s taken over the years, and the hard work he put in to get really good at each and every one of them.

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Michael C. Ruppert ~ 9/11 Attacks: Criminal Foreknowledge And Insider Trading Lead Directly To The CIA’s Highest Ranks

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Global Research | August 13 2012

As September approaches, we are reminded that the anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11 will soon be upon us once again. 11 years later, are we any closer to the truth about what really happened on that fateful day?

For the next month until September 11, 2012, we will be posting on a daily basis important articles from our early archives pertaining to the tragic events of 9/11. The following text by Michael C. Ruppert published in October 2001 brings to the forefront the issue of foreknowledge and insider trading pertaining to airline listings on the Chicago Board Options Exchange including United Airlines and American Airlines. ~Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research Editor

CIA Executive Director “Buzzy” Krongard managed Firm that handled “Put” Options on UAL

FTW Publications, 9 October 2001, Centre for Research on Globalisation, globalresearch.ca, 20 October 2001

Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That evidence also demonstrates that, in the case of at least one of these trades — which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed — the firm used to place the “put options” on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Until 1997 A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker’s Trust in 1997. Krongard then became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker’s Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected to money laundering. Krongard’s last position at Banker’s Trust (BT) was to oversee “private client relations.” In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being closely connected to the laundering of drug money.

Krongard joined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director George Tenet. He was promoted to CIA Executive Director by President Bush in March of this year. BT was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999. The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe. And, as we shall see, Deutsche Bank played several key roles in events connected to the September 11 attacks.

The Scope of Known Insider Trading

Before looking further into these relationships it is necessary to look at the insider trading information that is being ignored by Reuters, The New York Times and other mass media. It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades – in real time – as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests. Previous stories in FTW have specifically highlighted the use of Promis software to monitor such trades.

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Greg Hunter ~ Weekly News Wrap Up July 13 2012 [Video]

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USA Watchdog | July 13 2012

It looks like things are continuing to heat up in the Middle East.  Last week, there was news that the U.S. was sending more military assets to the Persian Gulf.  This week, the buildup continues with news the U.S. is sending underwater drones to combat possible Iranian mines and their drones.  Meanwhile, in Syria, the Russians are reportedly sending a flotilla of 11 warships to the Syrian coast for maneuvers.  NATO already has ships on the Syrian coast, and surveillance flights by the alliance are increasing in the region.  This is not how you set the table for peace in the Middle East, even though the U.N. is attempting to put the East and West together to find a peaceful solution.

The Libor rate rigging scandal appears to be the biggest financial fraud in history.  Barclays bank paid a $450 million fine last week to regulators, but more than a dozen international banks, and even the U.S. and UK governments, are implicated.  $800 trillion in commerce is based on this key rate.  Avalanches of lawsuits are reportedly on the way.  Another brokerage firm has gone bust (PFGBest), and around $200 million of customer money is missing.  The FBI is investigating, but where is the FBI investigation into MF Global?  It went bust on Halloween of last year!  Former New Jersey Governor and Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine ran the brokerage where $1.6 billion of customer money vanished.  What gives?

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Matt Taibbi ~ Accidentally Released – and Incredibly Embarrassing – Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in ‘Naked Short Selling’

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Rolling Stone | Common Dreams | May 16 2012

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.

The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.

Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed.

I contacted Morgan Lewis, the firm that represents Goldman in this matter, earlier today, but they haven’t commented as of yet. I wonder if the poor lawyer who FUBARred this thing has already had his organs harvested; his panic is almost palpable in the air. It is both terrible and hilarious to contemplate. The bank has spent a fortune in legal fees trying to keep this material out of the public eye, and here one of their own lawyers goes and dumps it out on the street.

The lawsuit between Overstock and the banks concerned a phenomenon called naked short-selling, a kind of high-finance counterfeiting that, especially prior to the introduction of new regulations in 2008, short-sellers could use to artificially depress the value of the stocks they’ve bet against. The subject of naked short-selling is a) highly technical, and b) very controversial on Wall Street, with many pundits in the financial press for years treating the phenomenon as the stuff of myths and conspiracy theories.

Now, however, through the magic of this unredacted document, the public will be able to see for itself what the banks’ attitudes are not just toward the “mythical” practice of naked short selling (hint: they volubly confess to the activity, in writing), but toward regulations and laws in general.

“Fuck the compliance area – procedures, schmecedures,” chirps Peter Melz, former president of Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing Corp. (a.k.a. Merrill Pro), when a subordinate worries about the company failing to comply with the rules governing short sales.

We also find out here how Wall Street professionals manipulated public opinion by buying off and/or intimidating experts in their respective fields. In one email made public in this document, a lobbyist for SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, tells a Goldman executive how to engage an expert who otherwise would go work for “our more powerful enemies,” i.e. would work with Overstock on the company’s lawsuit.

“He should be someone we can work with, especially if he sees that cooperation results in resources, both data and funding,” the lobbyist writes, “while resistance results in isolation.”

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Matt Taibbi ~ Fighting Bank of America

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Reader Supported News | April 7 2012

OPINION ~ There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it’s corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it’s a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn’t gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the “Too Big To Fail” concept. Because it is considered a “systemically important institution” whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

This is why the question of whether or not Bank of America should remain on public life support is so critical to all Americans, and not just those millions who have the misfortune to be customers of the bank, or own shares in the firm, or hold mortgages serviced by the company. This gigantic financial institution is the ultimate symbol of a new kind of corruption at the highest levels of American society: a tendency to marry the near-limitless power of the federal government with increasingly concentrated, increasingly unaccountable private financial interests.

The inevitable result of that new form of corruption is this bank, whose continued, state-supported existence should naturally outrage all Americans, be they conservative or progressive.

Conservatives should be outraged by Bank of America because it is perhaps the biggest welfare dependent in American history, with the $45 billion in bailout money and the $118 billion in state guarantees it’s received since 2008 representing just the crest of a veritable mountain of federal bailout support, most of it doled out by the Obama administration.

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Matt Taibbi ~ BofA – Raging Hurricane of Theft and Fraud

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Reader Supported News | March 29 2012

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it’s corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it’s a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn’t gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the “Too Big To Fail” concept. Because it is considered a “systemically important institution” whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

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Fire Them All!

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Greg Hunter | USA Watchdog
November 23 2011

Super Committee Failure

The not so “Super Committee Failure” ended with a whimper and finger pointing on Monday without so much as cutting a single penny in the bloated federal budget.  Not only that, but these reckless jokers didn’t even bother to negotiate up to the wire to give a deal their best shot.  They just gave up two full days before the deadline.  I guess getting home for Thanksgiving is more important than fixing a country teetering on calamity.  The words “pompous, self-centered, and arrogant” come to mind.  This boneheaded move is classic party politics.  It puts political gain and posturing above the good of the country.  We have no statesmen, just bag men.

I’ll bet members of the Tea Party who voted for $2.4 trillion in more spending a few months back feel sold-out right now.  With tax receipts falling and employment dropping, some predict the $2,400 billion freshly created cash will not last until November 2012.  Yes, there is a very good chance the country will, once again, run out of money.  That alone will be a coming catastrophe because the “spend now, cut later” cards are now all used up.  Long before that, the country will slide into trouble.  Of that, there is no doubt.  Sure, some of the ratings companies have said they won’t cut U.S. credit ratings, but how long is that going to last with mountains of red ink piling up.

According to Martin Weiss Ph.D. of MoneyandMarkets.com, America’s true total government debt outstanding is “118.3 percent of GDP (including U.S. government agencies).”   In his most recent report that came out the day the “Super Committee” failed to reach a reduction deal, he warned, “Do you truly think the three largest credit ratings agencies are going to simply ignore Congress’ failure? I think that’s a pipedream!  The rating agencies have flatly stated that their next likely step is to downgrade the U.S. government. That’s the specific, unambiguous definition of their “negative outlook” for the United States.  But we’re not the only ones pointing this out.  Even Merrill Lynch agrees that a downgrade is imminent: “The credit rating agencies,” writes Merrill, “have strongly suggested that further rating cuts are likely if Congress does not come up with a credible long-run plan. Hence, we expect at least one credit downgrade in late November or early December when the Super Committee [failure] crashes.” 

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The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For

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Robert Scheer | Truthdig
November 17 2011

In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top. What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed, and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” that he helped to create.

You would think that a former partner at the investment bank Solomon Brothers, which originated mortgage-backed securities, a man who then partnered with Merrill Lynch in the high-speed computerized trading that has led to so much financial manipulation, would have some sense of his own culpability. Or at least that someone whose Wall Street career left him with a net worth of $19.5 billion would grasp the deep irony of his being the instrument for smashing Occupy Wall Street, the internationally acknowledged symbol of opposition to corporate avarice.

But only in America is the arrogance of the superrich so perfectly concealed by the pretense of democracy that the 12th richest man in the nation can suppress dissent against corporate rapacity and expect his brutal actions to be viewed not as a means of preserving his own class privilege but as bureaucratically necessary to providing sanitary streets.

Even before he ordered the smashing of dissent by citizens peacefully assembled, Bloomberg denigrated their heartfelt message: “It’s fun and it’s cathartic,” he said of those huddled against the cold in a makeshift encampment, “… it’s entertaining to go and blame people. … It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”

It is mind-boggling that Bloomberg still hypes the canard that the banks were forced to reap enormous profits from toxic securities. It is an embarrassing, dishonest position when the record of banker fraud in creating the housing bubble is so well documented in Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuits. Is Bloomberg unaware that the major banks have agreed to pay hefty fines in a meager compensation for their schemes? That he blames the victims of the securitization swindles and then orders the arrest of those who dare speak the truth is a tribute to his belief in the enduring power of the big lie.

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Bank of America: Always Thinking of You

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Jim Hightower | Nation Of Change
November 16 2011

One way you can tell that a bank is in trouble is that it suddenly starts buying full-page ads in newspapers across the country that tell us what great shape it’s in and what a fine job it’s doing for our communities.

Such a PR push is now being made by Bank of America, which — despite its happy-face ads — is in a heap of hurt. How big of a heap? So big that it’s trying to share the hurt with you and me.

In the 2007-2008 Wall Street collapse, B of A took advantage of the crisis to bulk up its empire. Using $45 billion in bailout money from us taxpayers, the giant gobbled up two troubled financial powers, investment house Merrill Lynch and mortgage hustler Countrywide Financial. It is now choking on these mergers, as well as on its own executive incompetence. Its credit rating has been downgraded, its stock price has plummeted, its CEO is desperately trying to raise cash (and save his job) by firing 36,000 employees, and it managed to infuriate its own customers by trying to impose a $5 monthly fee on debit card users.

Now, though, CEO Brian Moynihan has a dandy plan to lighten his load by dumping a big chunk of it on the backs of us taxpayers. He’s trying to transfer a mess of bad investments from his Merrill Lynch subsidiary into B of A’s consumer banking unit. Why? Because that unit has about a trillion dollars in customer deposits that are insured by Uncle Sam. So, if Merrill’s sorry investments cause the banking unit to fail, the feds would be there to rescue it.

A banking expert has commented: “There is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the (federally insured) institution. We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”

“Fairly tight?” Uh-uh! We should have totally tight restrictions — as in, “No, you can’t do that.” Why should we let these failed capitalists turn into corporate socialists every time they get in trouble?

Then there’s Bank of America’s substance-abuse problem, which is turning into yet another problem for its customers.

It’s one thing to be addicted to a drug, but it’s worse to be hooked because someone else is addicted.

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The Global Super-Rich Stash: Now $25 Trillion

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By Sam Pizzigati | Nation Of Change
November 13 2011

Crown Prince of Brunei's wedding car

OP-ED | Another super-slick global financial analysis firm has just tallied how much net worth is sloshing around in the pockets of the world’s most spectacularly wealthy. So when will the time finally come to stop the counting — and start the taxing?

In today’s astoundingly unequal global economy, banks can go either of two routes — or both — to bag ever bigger returns. They can squeeze the 99 percent with nuisance fees and penalties. Or they can cater to the richest of the rich.

But both routes have bumps. The 99 percent can squeeze back, as they did earlier this month when Americans by the tens of thousands shut down their Bank of America accounts to protest the bank’s $5 debit card greed grab. And the richest of the rich? To cater to these fortunates, you have to first find them.

That can be difficult. Fortunately, financial industry consulting firms have stepped up to help. These firms have started publishing annual global wealth surveys that pinpoint where banks — and luxury retailers and anyone else who wants in on top 1 percent action — can find “high” and “ultra high” net-worth individuals.

Last week, a new global firm — the Singapore-based Wealth-X — entered the global wealth survey fray, joining a crowded field that already includes Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, the Boston Consulting Group, Credit Suisse, and Deloitte LLP.

Each of these firms has tried to carve out a unique market niche. The Wealth-X specialty? The world of the ultra rich, those individuals who can claim at least $30 million in net worth. And the researchers at Wealth-X haven’t just counted these ultras in their first annual global wealth census. They’ve tiered them.

For the entire world — and major nations — Wealth-X teases out subsets of the super rich, from the $30-to-$50 million set to the $1 billion and up. For the first time, thanks to Wealth-X, we can compare the barely ultra with the comfortably ultra and those super ultras who can make the comfortables seem pinched.

“Our report maps exactly where the biggest money is located,” Wealth-X CEO Mykolas Rambus boasted at a Geneva news conference last week, “and just how much there is.”

The Wealth-X research answers “how many” as well. The firm counts 185,795 individuals worldwide with at least $30 million net worth. These ultra high net-worth individuals — UHNWs — hold $25 trillion in combined wealth.

The global economy may be tottering, the new Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report 2011 goes on to inform us, but the “lifestyle habits of UHNW individuals have not been severely impacted.“

“Simply put,” the Wealth-X analyst team gushes, “the world’s wealthy elite are in a class of their own.”

In that class, Americans pack a bunch of the rows. Of the near 186,000 global ultra rich, 57,860 — 30 percent — carry U.S. passports. These American ultras hold a combined net worth of $7.6 trillion, an average of $131.4 million each.

That average masks a huge concentration of wealth at America’s summit. The 455 deep-pocketed Americans worth at least $1 billion hold half a trillion more in wealth than the 29,415 Americans in the Wealth-X $30-to-$50 million tier.

These numbers need a bit more context to have any real meaning, and we can take a stab at providing that context by glancing over at the “super committee” deficit-reductions deliberations now underway in Washington, D.C.

The 12 lawmakers on this congressional super committee — six Republicans and six Democrats — are trying to trim $1.2 trillion off federal red ink over the next ten years. On their chopping block: Medicare, Social Security, and assorted other programs essential to the well-being of America’s 99 percent.

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Mitt Romney’s Entitlement Plan Is Crazy

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By Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) | RS_News
November 8 2011

OPINION | David Brooks, the [gratuitous insult deleted], wrote this this morning entitled “Mitt Romney, the Serious One.” In it, he explained how Romney’s recent decision to unveil a plan for reforming the entitlement system “demonstrates his awareness of the issues that need to define the 2012 presidential election.”

Romney grasped the toughest issue – how to reform entitlements to avoid a fiscal catastrophe – and he sketched out a sophisticated way to address it.

So we had a giant financial crash in 2008 that necessitated a bailout costing a minimum of nearly $5 trillion and perhaps ultimately costing $10 trillion more, we have foreclosure crisis with more than million people a year losing their homes, and we have a burgeoning European debt disaster that threatens to devastate the global financial system – and the chief issue facing the country, according to Brooks and the Times, is reforming the entitlement system?

The column goes on to throw bouquets on Romney’s plan to semi-privatize Medicare and Social Security. Romney’s ideas are not as draconian as Paul Ryan’s, but they do pave the way for Wall Street’s ultimate goal – full privatization of Social Security and Medicare.

Think about what such reforms might mean. Your typical Medicare/Social Security recipient might already have been ripped off three different ways in this era.

He might have been sold a crappy mortgage or a refi by a Countrywide-type firm (which often targeted the elderly). He might then also have unwittingly become an investor in such mortgages and seen the value of his retirement holdings devastated (many of the banks sold their crappy mortgage-backed securities to state pension funds).

Lastly, if he paid taxes, he saw part of his tax money go to pay off the bets the banks made against these same mortgages.

So now that Wall Street has ripped off this segment of society three times, it makes all the sense in the world that Mitt Romney – a former Wall Street superstar who was a chief architect of the modern executive-compensation-driven corporation – is coming back and telling us that we need to cut their Medicare and Social Security benefits in order to defray the cost of the previous three scams.

(Actually, it makes sense. If we don’t cut health care and retirement benefits for old people, how can we pay for the carried-interest tax break that allows private equity guys like, well, Mitt Romney to keep paying 15 percent tax rates?).

There’s another aspect to all of this that boggles the mind.

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It’s Lonely (And Failure Ridden) Without the Goldman Net

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By Andrew Ross Sorkin | The NY Times
November 1 2011

He was from Goldman Sachs.

That is the refrain you hear over and over again when MF Global insiders try to explain why they went along with Jon Corzine’s risky trades — the same ones that caused a crisis of confidence at the firm and, ultimately, its bankruptcy on Monday.

Mr. Corzine was at Goldman Sachs for nearly 25 years, rising to become its senior partner before being ousted in a boardroom coup in 1999. He was considered a bright, aggressive trader who had a history of making big bets that paid off. When he joined MF Global last year — after a decade in politics as a Democratic senator and governor of New Jersey — he talked openly about his ambition to create a mini-Goldman.

Being a former Goldmanite has long been considered the ultimate calling card.

But, in some cases, it has proved to be a liability: A series of blunders by former senior Goldman executives raises questions about whether Goldman’s secret sauce can actually be exported. Think John Thain. Or Robert Rubin. Or J. Chris Flowers.

“Those people walked around with halos around them. Myths have been created on Wall Street. Nowhere is the myth bigger than at Goldman,” William Cohan, the author of “Money and Power, How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” a 658-page volume that explored the firm’s history and culture, said in an interview.

But Mr. Cohan, pausing briefly, added that whatever myths might exist around Goldman, “Everybody puts their pants on the same way, one foot at a time.”

It is a lesson that some of Goldman’s smartest alumni have learned the hard way, none more so than Mr. Corzine.

His outsize bets at MF Global on European sovereign debt — many of which he made personally — proved the firm’s undoing because of the large amount of leverage that he used to magnify his bets. As of the firm’s filing at the end of June, it had $44.4 billion worth of liabilities; yet it only had $1.4 billion of equity. That kind of leverage was enough to scare credit ratings agencies into downgrading the firm last week, which led counterparties to stop trading with it.

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