Britain and Germany announced their own investigations into the role of investment bank Goldman Sachs in losses incurred by UK and German banks, following Friday’s indictment of Goldman by the US Securities and Exchange Commission: here.
Goldman Sachs Earnings: Bank’s Profit Skyrockets To $3.5 Billion For First 3 Months Of Year: here.
Inside-Out: Goldman Sachs in the Spotlight: here.
What role did Goldman Sachs play in 2008 food crisis when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million? Here.
Goldman Sachs Leans Republican: here.
A managing director at Goldman Sachs has been charged with raping a 20-year-old woman in an East Hampton home he rents with his wife: here.
Wall Street crimes: here.
Under the banner of “Good Jobs Now! Make Wall Street Pay” Chicago labor and allies will be marching on LaSalle Street, Chicago’s version of Wall Street. The march on Wednesday, April 28th (11am, Willis Tower, 233 S. Wacker Dr.) is part of a series of demonstrations aimed at the banks and big investment houses. Chicago’s action is aimed at Goldman Sachs, headquartered in the Willis Tower, formally the Sears Tower. The Chicago action is the day before Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, will lead a demonstration on Wall Street. Other major actions are also being planned around the country: here.
Ireland: Quinn Insurance has been placed in administration for “serious and persistent breaches” of the solvency rules governing insurance companies: here.
Related articles
- Goldman Sachs: Taxes For You, But Not For Us (nationalreview.com)
- Goldman Sachs seeks $7m legal fees from Rajat Gupta (telegraph.co.uk)
- Bailout-loving Goldman Sachs gives early bonuses to avoid taxes (americablog.com)
- Goldman Sachs’ New Partners: The List (blogs.wsj.com)
- Goldman Sachs Was Like a ‘Frat on Steroids,’ Says Former Female Employee (jezebel.com)
- Book Review: Why I Left Goldman Sachs By Greg Smith (seekingalpha.com)
- Goldman Sachs Puts Four on Leave After Options Error, FT Reports (bloomberg.com)
- Pam Martens ~ Goldman Sachs’ Busted Trades; Busted Confidence In Fixing Wall Street (shiftfrequency.com)
- Goldman Sachs denies aluminium price-rigging – Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk)
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Goldman Sachs shows profit of $3.46 billion in first quarter
The earnings, which beat analysts’ expectations, come from the period before the bank was hit by an SEC fraud lawsuit.
By Nathaniel Popper, Los Angeles Times
April 20, 2010 | 7:08 a.m.
Reporting from New York
Goldman Sachs Group had an unexpectedly good quarter in the three months before it was hit by a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Goldman announced Tuesday morning that it earned a profit of $3.46 billion in the first quarter of 2010, or $5.59 a share. That is up from $3.39 a share in the first quarter of 2009, and it was stronger than the $4.14 a share that analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had expected.
The results are from the months immediately before the SEC sued the firm for securities fraud last Friday.
Goldman is the latest of the big banks to report a strong quarter, thanks largely to the trading of bonds and other fixed-income instruments. David Viniar, the firm’s chief financial officer, was upbeat about the economy.
“Economic growth throughout the world remained the single most important driver of our performance,” Viniar said in a conference call.
Goldman emerged from the financial crisis stronger than almost any other financial firm, but it has been buffeted by public criticism, and now the SEC lawsuit.
The company took the unusual step of including the general counsel, Greg Palm, on the earnings call with investors. Palm expanded on the defense that the company has already put forward.
“We would never intentionally mislead anyone, certainly not our clients,” he said.
Palm disputed many of the SEC’s allegations, but he took pains to say that he was not disagreeing with the legitimacy of the SEC.
“We do not in any way dispute the importance of the SEC’s role in protecting investors,” he said.
nathaniel.popper@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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Goldman Sachs under investigation
Finance: Investment bank Goldman Sachs is to be investigated after US authorities issued fraud claims against it, the City regulator has said.
The Financial Services Authority said it would launch a “formal enforcement investigation” into Goldman in relation to the Securities and Exchange Commission allegations in the US.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a special investigation into Goldman Sachs after reports that it is to rack up a bonus pot of £3.5 billion for the first quarter and he accused the bank of “moral bankruptcy.”
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/89366
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Goldman should back fired cook
INDUSTRIAL: The Unite union urged Goldman Sachs today to intervene in the dismissal of a catering worker from the firm’s Fleet Street offices.
Members of the union leafleted the office of the finance company in a protest against the unfair dismissal of a long-serving member of staff previously employed by catering contractor Aramark.
Unite officer Dave Turnbull said: “Unite is calling on Goldman Sachs to investigate what we believe to be an act of victimisation in retaliation for our member speaking out about potential ongoing discrimination against black and ethnic minority workers since Aramark took over the contract in September 2008.”
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/97532
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“The Enemy of My Enemy is My President” by Robert Scheer (editor-in
Sun Oct 14, 2012 12:34 pm (PDT) . Posted by:
“bigraccoon” redwoodsaurus
Truthdig / Op-Ed
Sunday 14 October 2012
Ever since Bill Clinton appointed Goldman honcho Robert Rubin to be his Treasury secretary, the firm has been the top corporate supporter of the Democrats, according to the authoritative Center for Responsive Politics.
The Enemy of My Enemy is My President
Maybe I have been too harsh in judging Barack Obama’s economic performance. Instead of following George W. Bush’s lead in bailing out the bankers first, I wanted Obama to do more for beleaguered homeowners and less for the Wall Street swindlers who trafficked in toxic mortgages. But the president must have done something right, or the hucksters at Goldman Sachs wouldn’t hate him so.
Ever since Bill Clinton appointed Goldman honcho Robert Rubin to be his Treasury secretary, the firm has been the top corporate supporter of the Democrats, according to the authoritative Center for Responsive Politics. And the investment paid off big time when Clinton followed Rubin’s lead and teamed up with congressional Republicans to reverse the sensible restraints on Wall Street that had kept the economy sound for six decades. Thanks to that decision, Goldman, a high-rolling investment house, was allowed to suddenly become a commercial bank and avail itself of the cheap money provided by the Federal Reserve to bail out troubled banks.
The financiers thought the fix was in once again when Obama turned to Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers as his key economic adviser in the 2008 campaign. Summers had replaced Rubin as Clinton’s Treasury secretary and had been even more vigorous in destroying the regulations that had maintained a stable financial system for 60 years. Wall Street turned against the GOP and its candidate John McCain, much preferring Obama. It should burnish the president’s reputation in the eyes of ordinary voters that those merchants of greed now feel so betrayed.
As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday: “When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to finance his campaign than Goldman Sachs Group Inc. This election, none has done more to defeat him.”
The high rollers at Goldman have given $900,000 to the super PACs supporting Mitt Romney but not a nickel to the main one backing Obama. Direct contributions to the GOP candidate are almost seven times higher than to his Democratic rival.
Wall Street’s disenchantment with the president is not restricted to the “fat cat bankers” at Goldman who became particularly incensed when Obama once labeled them as such. It extends throughout the financial elite who had come to feel a comfortable sense of ownership of both political parties. Employees at the top five banks—JPMorgan Chase; Citigroup, where Rubin went to work after leaving the Clinton White House; Bank of America; Morgan Stanley; and Goldman—donated $3.5 million to Obama in 2008, but this year cut that to $650,000. This time it was Romney who was showered with $3.3 million in contributions.
But let’s not go overboard in assuming that Obama has been some sort of populist. His reforms have been tepid and seem tough only in comparison to the get-out-of-jail-free cards that Romney now offers. The fat cats’ sense of betrayal at the hands of the Obama administration is obviously less a reflection of actual financial pain they endured these last three years than it is a mark of bankers’ uncontrollable greed.
The arrogance of these people, given the increased concentration of wealth in their hands during these years of profound financial crisis for most Americans, is beyond comprehension.
Consider the endorsement of Romney by Jim Donovan, the Goldman banker who handled relations with Bain Capital, the private equity firm run by Romney that dismembered companies and their jobs for outsized profit. He still manages Romney’s personal accounts, and although the details of those are not shared with the public, Donovan is quoted in The Wall Street Journal as assuring his banker colleagues that Romney’s “conviction and strength on fixing the U.S. economy is compelling as are his values.” Enough said.
I know that banker bashing can be off-putting in a media world practiced in dismissing all-too-accurate references to the extreme disparity of rewards to the richest as an expression of the irrationality of class warfare. But how else to describe the pique of an industry that feels oppressed by the Obama presidency despite an average annual wage of $362,950, which in 2011 increased by a not inconsiderable 16.6 percent over the previous two years. (That’s the average for securities industry employees, not to be confused with the $12 million eked out by Goldman CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein last year, down from the $68.5 million he got in 2007 when Goldman was happily constructing toxic security bundles.)
Those figures on the overall rise in Wall Street pay, released this week by the New York State comptroller, offer a stark reminder that under the policy of bailing out the banks, initiated by Bush but embraced by Obama, class warfare has been waged effectively not by the unemployed and foreclosed. It rather has been carried out by the bankers who caused the economic meltdown and who now are ticked off that Obama has not completely rolled over.
ABOUT ROBERT SCHEER
Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures.
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