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Aren't a LOT of people involved on the fedgov. side of things former Goldman Sachs employees????
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Goldman Sachs only lost money on their trading desk 8 days out of the entire quarter. I said that is like a baseball player hitting .600 plus for 3 months... maybe mathmetically possible, but not probable.
Well they better that this quarter - Bloomberg reports in the SEC filings that Goldman only lost money on 2 days out the entire quarter. So they are now hitting something like .900 for 3 months in baseball terms. Folks, there are 13 weeks a quarter, with generally 5 weekdays. That is 65 days. They made money 63 days. That's a 97% win percentage. I know they are the "smartest guys" in the room but no one does that. No one. Are the folks over at Morgan Stanely complete idiots? They can't even get close to these figures.
Goldman Sachs made more than $100 million in trading revenue on a record 46 separate days during the second quarter, or 71 percent of the time, breaking the previous high of 34 days in the prior three months.
Trading losses occurred on two days during the months of April, May and June, down from eight in the first quarter, the New York-based bank said today in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company made at least $50 million on 58 of the 65 trading days during the quarter, or 89 percent of the time.
New York Stock Exchange statistics show that Goldman Sachs is the most active member firm by volume of shares traded by “program trading,” or computer-assisted trading. In the latest period posted on the NYSE’s Web site, July 20-24, Goldman Sachs and its subsidiaries traded 924.8 million shares, roughly double the 463.7 million traded by its nearest competitor in the week, Morgan Stanley.
in part:
n each instance, those bonuses on average more than doubled earnings and were in turn more than doubled by the government bailout in TARP funds. Those funds, and the nonrefundable tens of billions passed on through the AIG bailout and other government programs, come from the very taxpayers already reeling from a banking collapse brought on by reckless lending practices.
Yet the $306 billion in toxic assets that Citigroup—a leader in the irresponsible practices that created such “assets”—managed to pile up are also now guaranteed by taxpayer funds. And being on the public dole didn’t prevent Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit from “earning” $38 million last year.
The Merrill Lynch bonuses were paid as the company was about to collapse. It was saved at the last minute by being purchased for $50 billion by Bank of America in a deal engineered by the federal government and facilitated by $45 billion in bailout funds to BofA. On Monday, Bank of America agreed to pay $33 million in penalties to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle an SEC complaint that BofA had deceived shareholders about those billions in bonuses.
One of those handsomely rewarded was Thomas Montag, now with BofA, who received a $39.4 million bonus for his work at Merrill Lynch, a reward for his performance as Merrill’s trading and sales chief, a position in which he presided over the billions in mortgage acquisitions that fueled the company’s downfall.
The banks, considered “too big to fail,” were quickly showered with enormous amounts of money, contributing to a U.S. deficit expected to grow to $1.86 trillion this year.
why do you assume that because they're successful they must be crooked?
LOL....a 97% win rate???
If you bet and won 97% of the time most normal people would think you were cheating or had some sort of incredible edge...
Read this too:
Inside The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print - broken link)
They werent "being crooks", they were doing what all the banks did -- repackaging and selling bad loans. Their second quarter earnings are being investigated because they did so amazingly well, and I think because some lawmakers in Congress want to score points with the constituents, but there's no accusation of wrongdoing.
They're just geniuses about money. They dont have to break any laws to be insanely successful.
Mr. Blankfein, in an e-mail message this week, disputed his private account, saying Goldman’s survival was never in doubt. Other Goldman executives reject the notion that the bank was rescued at all. “We did not have a near-death experience,” said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save Goldman Sachs, he said.
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Aren't a LOT of people involved on the fedgov. side of things former Goldman Sachs employees????
