Saturday 24 April 2010

Faber fiction & the Goldman gang



Marc Faber seems to make a rather common mistake: that of making a distinction between the free market and government, without recognising that the "third way" is the way the world works now - that is to say, the merger of state and corporate powers, aka fascism.
He even says this:

I think Goldman Sachs is a very honest firm. They have a very strict compliance department compared to the others — they're like an angel. But they targeted Goldman as it stands as a symbol of Wall Street.
Maybe the intention is not to hurt Goldman Sachs, but just to gain popularity with the middle class and the lower class of America, so they will perceive Mr. Obama to have done something against the evil of Wall Street.



What. The. Fuck. Like an angel? I had to play that bit twice to see if any irony was being projected, but no.
Let's have a look at some key players here.

  • Henry Paulson - 74th United States Treasury Secretary. Previously served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs.
  • Lloyd Blankfein - current Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. After the nomination of Hank Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, Blankfein was announced as his replacement.
  • Greg Craig - former White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. He has represented Goldman Sachs.
  • Gary Gensler is the chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama. Spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, becoming the company’s co-head of finance.

The list goes on, but you get the picture. It's other banks too, they're all complicit, but calling Goldman Sachs an angel because it complies with regulations (???) is an enormous misunderstanding of the situation. The government is in bed with the bankers, and scared of the CIA-military complex, and acts accordingly. It's like a symbiotic organism of bully-boys, back-scratchers and back-slappers - an old boys club. Like Celente says, Harvard Princeton Yale, bullets, bombs, banks.

They're like an international gang of financial terrorists, as Max Keiser has often said. They hid billions of debt for Greece when they joined the EU, and you can bet the farm they are short Greek bonds right now, all the way, leveraged up to the hilt. They are going to make a lot of money when Greece defaults, like they did with Iceland. Actually, they will be doing Greece a favour, like Soros did when he knocked us out of the ERM. But when the debt is all re-financed, it will be the Greek people who suffer most in the short term, because that's essentially their money that Goldman Sachs just sucked out of the system. The fact that it's measured in euros is good for GS because it will keep its value - if it were drachmas, the currency would inflate and the play would be less lucrative, which is the only reason Britain is safe from this kind of predatory action, unlike the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain).

You hear the defence, often from people in the industry, that they're smart, they're good at their jobs, they work hard, they're a money making machine, that's what they do, and you must be jealous to attack them, or ignorant - implying that they're doing "God's work" to use Blankfein's phrase, some mysterious mission that we're not able to comprehend.
There's no mystery. These guys simply don't know how to make money. They're not entrepreneurs. They don't create wealth. What are investment banks? They're casinos that gamble. With other people's money. They certainly don't respect their clients, they don't genuinely go out looking for worthy ventures to invest in. They invent derivatives instead. They front-run, they short the things they're telling their clients to buy - all this is well-documented.
So no, they're not smart, they're autistic. They're not a money-making machine, they're a money-sucking parasite. They contribute nothing to society but bribes and corruption. They would not exist were it not for their buddies at the Fed and in government, and in their alliance with the military elements.

Indeed, bad as GS are, the major problem is central banks, particularly Fed policy, and indeed the existence of the Fed. Everything else, all the corruption, is just a symptom of that. You give a select few unelected people complete control of the money supply, and what do you expect? It will only all come to a head when everyone realises that dollars are just that - pieces of paper, backed by a government's promise which, as we all know equals... zero. It never ceases to amaze me just how long these fiat currencies have managed to last. I guess it's a mass hypnosis, a big waking dream, or nightmare, that we're all a part of and are on the verge of waking up from.

The trigger could be anything. Drop in the dollar. Chinese revaluation. Commercial property bubble burst. It doesn't matter - the system is so out of balance now, the pinprick to the bubble could come from anywhere, at any time. And the longer this eerie calm exists, the bigger will be the pop.

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