The Great American Bubble Machine The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that its everywhere. The worlds most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Whos Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bushs last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clintons former Treasury secretary, spent 2. Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup which in turn got a 3. Paulson. Theres John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an 8. Archives and past articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly. Perkins Engine Manual. The initial coin offering party is over in China. A committee led by the Peoples Bank of China, the nations central bank, has imposed an immediate ban on new. Get the latest news and analysis in the stock market today, including national and world stock market news, business news, financial news and more. In Lifehackers new video series, Day 1, were tackling exactly what its like to be a newbie in a variety of possiblyintimidating situations, starting off. Hz6npkq_CRc/UXdyg2cuhjI/AAAAAAAABFQ/CwR9Xvv4RIA/s72-c/Bionic-Deluxe-Version_thumb%25255B1%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800' alt='Lloyd Banks Hunger For More Zip' title='Lloyd Banks Hunger For More Zip' />Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi billion dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thains sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives 2. Theres Joshua Bolten, Bushs chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed out insurance giant AIG, which forked over 1. Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman not to mention But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. Alb.58285114/500x500.jpg' alt='Lloyd Banks Hunger For More Zip' title='Lloyd Banks Hunger For More Zip' />Sports journalists and bloggers covering NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MMA, college football and basketball, NASCAR, fantasy sports and more. News, photos, mock drafts, game. Search the worlds information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what youre looking for. Drawing on unpublished diaries, memoirs and letters, The Great War tells the rich and complex story of World War I through the voices of nurses, journalists, aviators. Fortunately, every part of the USeven Alaska and Hawaiiwill see at least a partial eclipse. Plug your zip code into this tool from Vox to find out what the. Watch breaking news videos, viral videos and original video clips on CNN. What you need to know is the big picture If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. The banks unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump and dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that youre losing, its going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where its going The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth pure profit for rich individuals. The Feds vs. Goldman. They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. Theyve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1. If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long including last years strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasnt one of them. BUBBLE 1. The Great Depression. Goldman wasnt always a too big to fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill or be killed capitalism on steroids just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1. German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son in law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short term IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan. You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldmans first 1. In that ancient history theres really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events Goldmans disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre crash Wall Street in the late 1. Wall Streets Big Win This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an investment trust. Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and theoretically, at least invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest 1. Much as in the 1. Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation the bank issued a million shares at 1. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,2. 50,0. Blue Ridge, 6,2. 50,0. Shenandoah which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading. Taibblog Commentary on Politics and the Economy by Matt Taibbi. The end result ask yourself if this sounds familiar was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isnt hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it then you take that 1. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred. In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1. In Goldman Sachs We Trust, the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leveragebased investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the markets historic crash in todays dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled 4.