On April 9, 1940, an SEC attorney told a Senate subcommittee about a company that had grown so huge that it owned big pieces of several companies — and possibly had allowed its trading operation to help its banking operation.
The SEC lawyer even brought a chart to show the company’s varied tentacles. The chart, introduced as evidence in the congressional hearing, was titled “The Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation.”
That’s a heckuva kicker.
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Questions and exercises for journalism students.
Why does it come as such a surprise to anyone that Wall Street owns Washington --- that we now
have a government that is of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers. In most other
countries in the world there would've been a
revolution by now --- maybe what's holding us back is that we still have our televisions and telephones, and clothes to wear, and food to eat, and we don't want to lose those as well.
Or maybe we have a premonition that if we do take action, we might be confronted by hundreds
of thousands of Blackwater mercenaries who would be brought back from overseas exadctly for that purpose.
#1 Posted by Kenneth Weinberg, CJR on Fri 11 Dec 2009 at 04:24 PM
Perhaps it is time for federal regulators and Department of Justice to make a public announcement and tell this to the millions of American families who have lost their homes to proprietary trading schemes of investment bankers.
Tell it to victims of mortgage servicing fraud. Explain to them how these banks subsidiary servicers were complicit in fabricating bogus mortgage defaults so parent banks could reap lucrative profits with rigged credit default swap bets in vast insider trading schemes. Tell them how profitable mortgage defaults and foreclosures were for Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bear Stearns, Credit Suisse, Deutche Bank and others while the music lasted. Tell them that their taxpayer bailout money is currently being used to this end. Tell them that real mortgage modifications aren't happening despite $27,392,450,000 Billion being committed to criminal servicers for that purpose because everyone makes more money in credit default swap casinos. Then tell them to their faces that there is nothing that can be done about it because these perpetrators are too big to prosecute.
#2 Posted by Blossom Twig, CJR on Fri 11 Dec 2009 at 10:25 PM