And this time they are applying what they’ve learned from the previous two bubbles.

Facebook and Goldman Sachs unleashed a tech investing mania this week compared far and wide with the euphoric 1990s dot-com run-up. By arranging a $500 million private investment, at a staggering $50 billion valuation, Goldman at once delayed a Facebook public offering (now expected in 2012), prompted a likely LinkedIn IPO, and thrilled its clients, who clamored for a piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth.

But for all the nostalgia for pre-IPO “friends and family” stock in Pets.com, the dot-com era comparisons are off base. Instead, Goldman’s Facebook deal mirrors the subprime collateralized debt obligation deals that blew up entire companies, as well as crater-size hole in our economy. In fact, what Goldman just engineered might well be worse.

[...]

Yet the Facebook phenomenon shows us that nothing has changed. Goldman again moved aggressively to get the business—investing $75 million into Facebook early, at a low valuation, through one of its hedge funds, in the same way it used to get CDOs rolling—again will rake in the fees (to the tune of $60 million—upfront) and again will pawn off the overvalued results to its clamoring clients, who don’t have nearly as much information as Goldman.

If you’re one of those investors, here’s the deal in a nutshell: You get to buy shares, forking over 5 percent of any possible gains, on top of a 4 percent placement fee and a 0.5 percent expense reserve fee (so you’re down 10 percent before the game starts) in a private company that doesn’t have to disclose any pertinent financial information to you or any regulator for 15 months. For the privilege, Goldman gets its eight-digit windfall.

[...]

Goldman does seem to have learned one lesson. One of the problems brought up by the Abacus CDO deal that prompted the $550 million fine was the idea that Goldman was helping one client short the deal against another client. To avoid another uncomfortable SEC incident, and the nuisance of public scrutiny, they’ve put the sell possibility right out front: a disclaimer allowing them to dump their shares, or perhaps short them, at any point. Which is extra convenient, since Goldman is privy to far more information about Facebook than the people they would sell them to: insider trading in the public markets—upfront and legal here.

So, just to recap: Goldman is going to make a shit ton of money off of this deal by legally robbing investors and nobody gives a shit.

Looks like it’s time for me to quit jerking-off to pictures of old girlfriends and delete my Facebook account.

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Tags: Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Wall Street
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Money is not real:

Of course, much of the world’s elite understand exactly what they’re doing: i.e., use the economic catastrophe they themselves created as a pretext to kill the welfare state they’ve despised for 65 years. Nonetheless, a significant chunk of them actually believe they’re doing the right thing for everyone.

How is this possible? The best explanation I’ve seen appears in a 1994 book by John Ralston Saul called The Doubter’s Companion. It’s a kind of dictionary—the whole book is just him defining and discussing a bunch of words. And one thing he defines is “debt, unsustainable levels of.” Everything you need to understand about our current attempt to obliterate ourselves can be found within it. His most important point is that money is not real. Yet somehow we’ve decided it’s a great idea to stop feeding real food to real people and cease educating real children in order to demonstrate fealty to an abstract concept.

My favorite parts are these, but you should go below the fold and read the whole thing:

A nation cannot make debts sustainable by cutting costs. Cuts may produce marginal savings, but savings are not cash flow. This is another example of the alchemist’s temptation…
Civilizations which become obsessed by sustaining unsustainable debt-loads have forgotten the basic nature of money. Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring abstract value. Unhealthy societies often become mesmerized by money and treat it as if it were something concrete. The effect is to destroy the currency’s practical value.

I wish someone would inform these cunts about this:

Yesterday, Senator Patty Murray requested unanimous consent on the Homeless Women Veterans and Homeless Veterans with Children Act, a bill she has sponsored that would provide aid to those who have served there country but find themselves with no place to sleep at night.
The days are long gone when I was surprised that Republicans in Washington wouldn’t stand up for Vets, but this is a whole new level. Senate Republicans actually objected to and stood as a road block for providing aid to our Nation’s heroes that are living on the streets, even those with children.

Republicans have no problem with spending trillions of dollars on worthless wars, but when it comes to throwing a little chump change at the poor they bitch like a 16-year-old menstruating girl getting kicked out of a Twilight movie. It’s un-fucking-believable.

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Tags: Government, I'm Need A Goddamn Drink, Money, Wall Street
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Once again Wall Street has played us for fools:

The financial reform legislation making its way through Congress has Wall Street executives privately relieved that the bill does not do more to fundamentally change how the industry does business.

Despite the outcry from lobbyists and warnings from conservative Republicans that the legislation will choke economic growth, bankers and many analysts think that the bill approved by the Senate last week will reduce Wall Street’s profits but leave its size and power largely intact. Industry officials are also hopeful that several of the most punitive provisions can be softened before it is signed into law.

[...]

“If you talk to anyone privately, there’s a sigh of relief,” said one veteran investment banker who insisted on anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. “It’ll crimp the profit pool initially by 15 or 20 percent and increase oversight and compliance costs, but there’s no breakup of any institution or onerous new taxes.”

[...]

Still, it could have been worse. The Senate rejected rules that would have broken up huge banks considered “too big to fail,” or imposed limits on their size. Caps on how much banks can charge credit card holders to borrow also fell by the wayside. And the long-established wall between trading and commercial banking, which was torn down in 1999, will not be going back up.

Another reason for relief, several bankers said, is that neither the Senate version of the bill nor the one passed by the House in December includes more populist provisions that have gained a foothold in Europe, like a tax on financial transactions or on individual bonuses.

You really didn’t think any meaningful reform was going to happen, did you? I mean, the Obama administration and key Democrats have been pretty clear about not wanting to upset their pimps. So you should just be grateful that these worthless rules will pass.

As the wise Doug Stanhope once said:”At least black people knew when they where slaves.”

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Tags: Financial Reform, Obama, Wall Street, Why Don't Terrorists Go After These Cunts
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Also, the sky is blue, Lebron James will never win a championship, and Chris Dodd is a cunt:

Wall Street is poised to score a victory in its efforts to beat back a crackdown on banks that trade the complex financial products known as derivatives.

On Tuesday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., proposed a compromise change to the Wall Street reform bill that would water down a proposed ban on derivatives trading by many financial firms.

[...]

Under the changes proposed by Dodd, the swaps ban would be postponed while a council of regulators studies it and recommends to Congress whether the full ban or a partial ban should go forward.

If regulators decide the ban is a bad idea, they must come up with new minimum standards to guide banks about derivative trading. If regulators decide the ban is a good idea, the ban wouldn’t take affect for two years, according to the amendment.

The Senate will have to vote on the changes in coming days, but financial services and derivatives groups were breathing a sigh of relief on Tuesday.

“The proposed solution gives some breathing room to a heavy-handed provision that would have resulted in more risk in the system,” said Scott Talbott, senior lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable.

I wonder if Chris Dodd cups Wall Street’s balls when he’s gobbling Wall Street’s dick?

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Tags: Chris Dodd, Chris Dodd Loves Rich Cock, Financial Reform, Wall Street
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This made me shit my pants in anger:

Last week, White House officials quietly approached leading financial firms seeking formal letters of support for a Congressional overhaul of financial regulations. One Wall Street powerhouse was left off the list: Goldman Sachs.

Given the government’s lawsuit against Goldman, “the message,” said a financial industry executive involved in the discussions about the White House solicitation, “was that Goldman’s opinion doesn’t matter and that it would be negative if Goldman was supportive of what we were doing.”

Can you imagine White House officials approaching rapists seeking formal letters of support for tougher rape laws? What about approaching murders seeking formal letters of support for tougher murder laws? Or approaching drug users seeking formal letters of support for tougher drug laws?

Fuck no.

Then why the hell does our government feel the need to ask Wall Street for their permission to pass tougher financial laws?

Oh, I see. It all makes sense now.

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Tags: Congress, Fucking pussies, Obama, Wall Street, You Can Do Anything If You're Rich Enough
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Shocking, I know:

Senate Republicans held together Monday afternoon to block efforts by Democrats to officially begin debate on the financial industry reform bill.

No Republicans cast a “yes” vote on the procedural motion, keeping Democrats from the 60 vote threshold needed to move forward. One Democrat, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, voted “no” outright.

[...]

Among the bill’s provisions are the creation of a system for dismantling struggling large firms, the establishment of a consumer protection agency, and a requirement that derivatives be traded openly. The House has already passed its version of the legislation.

[...]

One difference between the two sides is over a proposed Consumer Protection Agency, which Democrats say will keep Americans from being taken advantage of by predatory lenders. Republicans fear the agency could be costly and add an unnecessary and harmful layer of regulation (emphasis mine).

Could someone please give me an example of unnecessary and harmful regulation of Wall Street? Because I’m drawing a blank here. I mean, the reason why our economy went balls up was because of a lack of regulation; which gave way to the rampant fraud on Wall Street.

But then again, what the fuck do I know? I’m not a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator. But William K. Black is. And he agrees with me:

Control fraud epidemics can arise when financial deregulation and desupervision and perverse compensation systems create a “criminogenic environment”.

Goddammit, I love it when I’m right.

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Tags: Financial Reform, Republicans love rich cock, Wall Street
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And nobody seems to care:

The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers’ colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud.

[...]

If the Securities and Exchange Commission’s case is proved – and it is aggressively rebutted by Goldman – the charge is that Goldman’s vice-president Fabrice Tourre created a dud financial instrument packed with valueless sub- prime mortgages at the instruction of hedge fund client Paulson, sold it to investors knowing it was valueless, and then allowed Paulson to profit from the dud financial instrument.

[...]

Brutally, the banks knowingly gamed the system to grow their balance sheets ever faster and with even less capital underpinning them in the full knowledge that everything rested on the bogus claim that their lending was now much less risky. That was not all they were doing. As Michael Lewis describes in The Big Short, credit default swaps had been deliberately created as an asset class by the big investment banks to allow hedge funds to speculate against collateralised debt obligations. The banks were gaming the regulators and investors alike – and they knew full well what they were doing.

[...]

Now it has all collapsed, to be bailed out by western taxpayers. The banks are resisting reform – and want to cling on to the business practices and business model that has so appallingly failed. It is obvious why: it makes them very rich. The politicians tread carefully, only proposing what the bankers say is congruent with their definition of what banking should be.

Let me repeat that last sentence for you:

The politicians tread carefully, only proposing what the bankers say is congruent with their definition of what banking should be.

That sentence is the reason why I’m not surprised at the pussified bill put forth by Chris Dodd. It’s the reason why I’m not surprised Obama sent Rahm Emanuel to New York to host a private meeting begging investors not to flee the Democratic Party. And it’s the reason why I won’t be surprised when nothing happens to Goldman Sachs.

Because our masters expect us to apologize to them for flinching when they cum on our faces.

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Tags: Goldman Sachs, Pussy Politicians, Thank Zeus It's 4/20, Wall Street
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