we don't need no stinking bonus:

You're Rich and You Don't Know It

let the looting continue, all skate

PONIES!!!!

Nemo's listed as on line & I beat him. How?

Go, Goldman, go
Thine will be America's
last drop of blood!

Why, am I a thief?
when a corpse
of its valuables I relieve?

how else are they supposed to retain talent?

Raise taxes to 90% for these shameless creeps. You can figure out how, O!

What's going on in Tehran?

Goldman's good works are a benefit to us all.

The talent required to manage the systemic risk (that they provide for us) can only be retained by these bonuses.

These cowboys aren't tearing our faces off, they're tearing faces off for us!

Rape and Scrape is well, and thriving.
Has anyone noticed the French Aristocracy is no longer with us?

With glee, I eagerly anticipate the impending collapse of the US financial sector, bond and equities market.

liz: spoke yesterday to a good friend just returned from Iran. He got out just before the elections, so maybe second hand. He was settling his brother's estate for a few months prior.

He said it came from out of the blue, nobody with any idea it would come to this. He sez it's regime change coming.

Whether internal as I think or driven from without as some here may opine, matters not. It's on and it won't end soon. Game changer.

If Paulson wasn't working for GS, he should have been. '05 to '08 Net Tangible Assets tripled from @ $20B to $59B. Of course, they've got a new definition of tangible now too...

You have just got to be jerking my leg...This is a joke, right?
.
.
Where is the congress and admin on this outrage?
Didn't "O" previously tell Wall Street, that the only thing between them and an irate public was the admin?
.
.
.
It think the time is getting close to the nationalization of the US financial system...

liz,

Here's a slideshow of footage from Iran. It's mostly chaos. Police are shooting into crowds. Stuff is burning. Some of it looks like people standing in a street not doing much of anything. Iranians are filming it and leaking it on the internet.

If the proletariat rises up, how will you distinguish yourself from the bourgeois?

"If the proletariat rises up, how will you distinguish yourself from the bourgeois? "

Easily. When the mob comes just shoot your neighbour point blank...."see, I am on your side"

I don't have a problem with paying deserved bonuses. It's the ones based on (legalized) accounting fraud that tick me off.

I always wondered that. Where is Buffett? Remember his actions during the Solomon Brothers fiasco? I've always wondered why IB's were such hot stocks when the shareholders don't see any of the reward. Especially for a high flyer like GS.

josap---+10

The bankers really should get a bonus for busting the UAW in BK down to an appropriate Chinese wage. The new car plant in Louisiana claims to be offering jobs averaging $40,000/year. Of course, they can fire you whenever they want for whatever reason, or no reason; no mention is made of a health plan, if any, or a pension; or profit-sharing; not even a bonus.

This alone should drive Obongo's approval numbers into the high 40's. But it won't, the cult of personality will continue.

I wonder what the bonus fixing racket inside GS is like? My gawd that must be particularly viscous!

Not sure I understand the Obama anger. Paulson gave GS the bailout money, Obama put restrictions on that, GS pays back the money, and Obama should be blamed? Please explain in detail, not with snark.

With GS paying back the TARP funds, the gov has no say in what is paid out in bonuses.
Why do you think they paid it back, just self interest as usual.

But I do understand why no one, including GS, wants the gov in their business.

.
The LOOTING CONTINUES!
.
Pitchforks and torches, folks.
.

GS could be laid low in a week if public opinion made it embarrassing for anyone to be their client, their investor or their employee.

For shame Warren Buffet. Boycott his books. Drag his name through the mud at parties. He likes to be liked.

[Full disclosure: I have a short position in GS, and would never buy shares in a bank. What great new inventions do they foster? I know, tranches of widgets...]

Treas.-Alt---I too am upset by the slow pace of change, but, in this case, what could have been done? They gave the money back--do any here suggest wage/price controls?

1 currency now -yogi (profile) wrote on Sun, 6/21/2009 - 8:11 am replyIgnore userGS could be laid low in a week if public opinion made it embarrassing for anyone to be their client, their investor or their employee.

Unfortunatly, "the public" is always someone else in our country.

Do I understand correctly that even though the TARP Funds ARE paid back, the governmentally-backed loans from GS HAVEN'T been?

-- But unfortunately, not vivisectionist. --

I dunno, ask the slobs who got screwed out of the bonus pool. Its step-and-fetch-it for another year for them.

"Maybe we will all be Tehran!"

.....we're not hungry enough yet, Liz......

how the US economy will perform over next couple yrs.
- Continuing Recession & Unemployment
- CRE will be crushed
- RRE still tanking
- Consumer spending going down

My repeated Point of FACT: Obama and his Wall St bought and paid for economic team have put all their chips on the Banking Oligarchs e.g. Record Bonuses on tap for Goldman Staff

Gorbachev warns that the world’s current economic model, created by “America’s elite,” is “cracking”. As it comes undone, many will suffer, he predicted. “Including the United States.”

In many respects he's right but most Americans today are too ignorant or complacent to demand REAL change

With all this money, isn't the most insignificant go-fer gonna get a bonus at GS?

Maybe they'll put it all in Citi and Citi will fail!

There were more protesters.

The Spanish would have lost to the Aztecs, if it weren't for disease.

One less day til Caliboomday.

What, 40 days or so? Is any awareness growing out there.

How many GS-ers live in Cali?

@Mel - the admin ALLOWED them to pay the money back. Accounting gymnastics ALLOWED by the gov't lets them mark their assets at basically whatever they want to value them at.

Take a look at their books. How does a company that loses $2B in one quarter book a $19B increase in Net tangible assets in that same quarter? (Q-ending Nov. 08). How did that happen during what was supposedly one of the worst financial collapses of all time?

There should be GS bankers, Treasury Secretaries, and FED chiefs on trial. That'd be a good place for O to start

"do any here suggest wage/price controls? "

In exchange for Treasury-backed FDIC insurance and access to FED windows?

Absolutely. To qualify for most Federal aid you have to meet certain requirements. Banks are no different.

They were also few, very few. The allies would have turned on the Spanish I think,
if it weren't for the disease factor.

1 currency now -yogi (profile) wrote on Sun, 6/21/2009 - 11:25 am

"do any here suggest wage/price controls? "

In exchange for Treasury-backed FDIC insurance and access to FED windows?

Absolutely. To qualify for most Federal aid you have to meet certain requirements. Banks are no different."

Could Obama do this without legislation?

-- they will massacre the protesters --

It hinges on the loyalty of the Armed Forces. And also the governance of the mob. In Tienanmen moderate elements lost control of the mob.

........the spanish had guns........the Aztecs didn't..........the Chinese protesters didn't...........the Iranian protesters don't........the American protesters did have weapons, and established a Country........

The 19 selected rings rule and the one ring rules them all...
So who holds the one ring, I don't think its Bilbo or Frodo...

So... in 2006 Goldman Sachs average salary was 622,000 USD. And these are bigger bonuses.

Good deal: Average Goldman Sachs employee makes $622,000 - The Boston Globe

sigh

Black Star Ranch:

Yup. Douche bags who say that Twitter and Facebook will save the day are hopelessly naive. A brutal and determined regime can crush an unarmed rebellion in minutes. The same technology that helps send out Tweets also leads to an extremely short attention span that guarantees the regimes safety in the long term. Most of these technology companies pushing the Internet will save us all crap have most of their hardware manufactured in China. Enough said.

Lawerliz:

To read more about the Spanish v Aztecs, read Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Regardless of what you think of his politics (he is a right winger), he is an excellent writer and historian. He discusses the battle of Tenochticlan in detail, as well as why the Aztecs were eventually doomed. Disease really helped, but guns and tactics carried the day.

So, who will be our Hobbits, in this time of crisis?

Frodo lives!

Written on the walls of the NYC subways in the 60s...

@Nuke

The Iranian commander who's son gets shot by the secret police is a threat that may have to be reckoned with.

Eliminate their bank holding company status and the access it gives them to Fed liquidity facilities. Eliminate the FDIC backing of their bonds.

SEOUL — A North Korean cargo ship was reportedly steaming toward Myanmar on Sunday even as it was shadowed by a U.S. Navy destroyer, posing the first test of how far the United States and its allies will go to stop the North’s suspected arms trade under a new United Nations resolution.
......
my old stomping ground.... but the Sec Con Res has no teeth.... that ship will dock in Burma and unload their illicit cargo and then head to Singapore

O had a better chance of handling the financial crap than did McCain.

He's blown it and is entirely in the pocket of the oligarchs.

If you're reading this, BO, then you've missed the boat and blown your credibility.

Time to take down GS, Citi and the lot of them. Collateral damage be damned...the real damage comes in letting them live as is.

"The difference between a man and a sheep is that a sheep just bleats, but a man keeps saying the same thing in different ways until he gets what he wants".
- Greek orator (?) and Goldman Sachs

So just in salary, one banker does the work of 15 auto plant workers in Louisiana. He or she really does deserve the bonus, for all that hard work.

Manufacturing money through leverage, arbitrage, special favors, et. al. is really hard work. The US doesn't care about manufacturing anything of real value, but greatly rewards piling on of leveraged debt and phoney wealth creation.

Have you all tried making a house of cards? Not so easy it seems. As always, those who have to gold make the rules.

BSR- Add the Apaches, Commaches, Sioux and Blackfoot to that list of guns vs rocks. I would take a wild gander and say american indians would have beat the snot out of the aztecs..they were tough on our armies..arrows and guns...

Happy Fathers Day to all of you.. 3rd round of the Open....breakfast (fingers crossed) cooked by the daughter, coffee...walk to the park...dinner...simple sells!

@Mel - We can realistically deal with the problems now, instead of trying to maintain the illusion, or when we eventually are forced to deal with it, the problem will just be exponentially bigger. Imagine how much less pain there would have been to deal with this debt spiral five, or ten, or twenty years ago. Then imagine how much worse it will be if we allow (or are allowed) to double or triple the debt from here.

Samdog (profile) wrote on Sun, 6/21/2009 - 8:59 am

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* Ignore user

GS: "We earn our money the old-fashioned way -- political payoff ..."

I believe the correct answer is "we steal it"

Hey, is not for horses...

Hey, why don't we revoke "person" rights to corporations?

We can't all be Halliburton.

Power structures are never permanent because their operators cannot resist going too far, eventually. American democracy has been successful because we've avoided extremism. Nobody ever completely wins, nor completely loses. That doesn't mean things don't get out of control occasionally; troops have been deployed domestically numerous times. We're not there. Yet.

Goldman is just demonstrating a corporate analog to the Laffer Curve. As they get more greedy the total "take" gets smaller again--unfortunately hurting everyone in the process. If it feels like it's taking forever for justice, think forward to the day these men die. All they'll have is money, and it will be of no use to them. They will know the error of their ways, the devastation they've wrought, but not in time. A tragedy really. All their power and wealth cannot redeem the tears of one child they harmed. How sad for them.

Mel, you are right. Changing things in midstream won't work.

However people are pretty mad. An unwind plan along with some real regulation and oversite would sure help. I think we will get there, but it will take a long time. And the US public has the attention span of a knat for the most part. Waiting 6 months for anything is beyond most peoples ability today.

At this point we either crash hard and fast. Or we crash slower and drag the bottom for years. The only plus in any of this is that some people are learning to pay attention to their own money.

How about some doomer porn?

"If you are a typical American and have expectations of increasing income, cheap food, nondiscretionary spending, leisure time and vacations in Hawaii, then the change we expect soon could be what you would consider 'doom,'" he says soberly, "because your life is going to fall apart."

"[Chu] was my boss," Fridley says. "He knows all about peak oil, but he can't talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can't say anything about it."

I received a record bonus this year. In fact, it was less than half of what I received 2 years ago.

zephyrum,

I do not think that they give a F*ck about anyone's children but their own!

For that matter, I don't think they care about the damage that they have done and continue to do to America...After the destruction, they will move on to greener fields...hopeful that would be Mars...

-- Explain how Lehman being allowed to fail was a catastrophe. For whom? --

Well, Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford come to mind.

Frank Rich having fun this morning in the NYTImes...despite the evidence, he still supports Obama...the question is, why?

"Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois, correctly observed in April that the banks are “still the most powerful lobby” in Congress and that “they frankly own the place.”

The banks’ influence at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue is also conspicuous. The revolving door between the government and Wall Street is as greasy as ever in this White House. It’s all too depressing that the administration enforced its no-lobbyists policy to shun a human-rights advocate, Tom Malinowski, a lobbyist for genocide victims in places like Darfur, but granted Geithner a waiver to appoint a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as his chief of staff.

Obama is very eloquent in speaking of the “culture of irresponsibility” that led us to the meltdown, but that culture isn’t changing so much as frantically rebranding. A.I.G. is now named A.I.U., and has employed no fewer than four public relations firms, including one whose bipartisan roster of shills ranges from the former Hillary Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn to the former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino.

Taxpayers are paying for that P.R., having poured $170 billion-plus into A.I.G."

BTW, did you notice the Iranian Government Sympathizers and Cops had GUNS and the "protesters" had ROCKS?
That is when revolutions are won (Russian, French), when the elite no longer has the support of the army or police.
It could happen in Iran, but i would not hold your breath.

@josap - People starting to pay attention to their finances, and working to pay down their debt is the one good thing that's come out of this mess. Too bad the gov't is more than offsetting that prudent behavior by taking on more debt than the public is paying off.

But Goldman Sachs lends money to small businesses, American families, grandmas and pets...

"It could happen in Iran, but i would not hold your breath."

Soap box, ballot box, ammo box? I'd say their might be a lot of arms next door, but the recipients of that largess are probably aligned with the gov. It might take a crackdown to sway public regional opinion another way.

At least they are out in the streets. It looks to me like the banks have the White House, Congress and the Judiciary without a peep. Well, except for the highly dubious, destractors of the "tea paries." I mean, look how they rub our noses in it with the GS "earnings".

When will changing a rule not be in "midstream"?

CR. I can only access this blog via iPhone now. I am going to Calculated Risk  in all cases. From the laptop and work desktop it gives a Failed to Connect on firefox and IE

"I received a record bonus this year. In fact, it was less than half of what I received 2 years ago."

Yeah, well the tap on the shoulder and pink slip are not so much of a ego booster.

@Tim - GS makes loans that grandma can't afford, then bundles them up and sells them as triple-A to her pension fund, taking big bonuses all the way for their legal scams, with the end result that grandma is out of a house, with less money coming in from her pension that got hit with the big losses.

@Blackhalo & Lost - you forgot that if worst comes to worse, they can eat them.

Treasury-Altered Reality Plan (profile) wrote on Sun, 6/21/2009 - 9:30 am

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@Tim - GS makes loans that grandma can't afford, then bundles them up and sells them as triple-A to her pension fund, taking big bonuses all the way for their legal scams, with the end result that grandma is out of a house, with less money coming in from her pension that got hit with the big losses.

@Blackhalo & Lost - you forgot that if worst comes to worse, they can eat them.

So, I guess that its not only the revolutionaries who "eat their own", unless we consider the elites as revolutionaries...

That Paulson coin is only bronze.

I'll buy one if it were crap sealed in plastic.

with less money coming in from her pension that got hit with the big losses.

Unless it's a public fund, in which case the fund just bills the state or city for the investment losses. The FY audits for smallish muni pension funds are starting to trickle in across the country. Not pretty.

"Goldman, a prime broker of US government bonds, is expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from selling and dealing in the bonds."

Kill them with Treasury Direct. Someone tell China.

These guys don't understand once they've destroyed money, they've destroyed
it for themselves too.

Pigged again!!

timmyone....
"Easily. When the mob comes just shoot your neighbour point blank...."see, I am on your side" !!!
....
rolling on the floor mouth full of food...!
....
friend just hit Yangon a few days ago, hmm.... email him and coax him to
swim out to the NK ship... yeah, that's the ticket!

HT to fried from Liz

Many thanks.

Question marks indeed.

What are the questions we should be asking? What happened to changes for ratings agencies that gave high marks for bogus mortgage securities? Why trust the Fed which, in the words of one critic “started the fire” through low interest rates to extinguish it

Simon Johnson, the ex-IMF Chief now at MIT asks some others

•Has the President really been briefed on the supposed benefits of having large financial institutions with great economic power and pervasive political influence? Don’t just claim that these are a good thing – tell us, in detail and preferably with numbers, what we the public gain from the presence of these behemoths among us. Keep in mind that “everyone has them” is no kind of argument – something so manifestly dangerous is not to be blindly copied.

•Why was executive and other compensation so notably absent from the latest Geithner-Summers joint statement of our problems and likely solutions? Does the President really expect us to believe that any set of reforms will work if they do not directly constrain the amounts that can be earned from misunderstanding risk today and hoping that the consequences do not appear on your watch? Does he have any idea of how the people who run big financial firms will game whatever controls try to limit their risk-taking?

•. Can President Obama finally talk about the much broader break down of corporate governance in this country, with boards of directors serving no discernible purpose in terms of limiting the excesses of corporate executives in the financial sector but also more broadly? Surely, without a reform package that includes measures to address this core issue, we will get exactly nowhere.”

The Obama Financial Reforms: Road to Change or Perdition?
Stabilizing A Flawed System is Not The Same As Restructuring Or Remaking It

by Danny Schechter
From Globalresearch.ca
The Obama Financial Reforms: Road to Change or Perdition?

LawyerLiz, Goldman is The Government's whore.

Comrade, its good to be the one running the three card monte game, isn't it.
Specially when the cops have been properly paid off.

You forgot step eight, go short and shear even more on the way down by providing excess contracts and liquidity to those who want to short (for a fee, of course!)

GS is the ultimate parasite. Now they have to figure out a way to get back that investment they gave to Berkshire for cheaps.

I am sure they are working on it feverishly.
Everytime I think I am too cynical, GS reaffirms my take on wallstreet as a con job operator.

Someday this war's gonna end...

FDIC insured bonds, AIG money laundering operations, off balance sheet accounting, federal reserve hide the salami swaps, Warren Buffett 's predatory loans, wild and wooley stock and commodity speculation, nothing will stop Goldman Sachs from doling out lavish bonuses, it is a gubbermint decree, GS shall be rich, and so shall anyone who works there, even if it impoverishes the entire world.

Damn it! Threads like this scream for a McCarthy song but few of them are posted on Youtube and none of the ones I'd pick. This is a fine moment for "The Procession of Popular Capitalism" or "And Tomorrow the Stock Exchange will be the Human Race."

"But as I posted yesterday, I find this nauseating and shameful.

This may be the straw that breaks the camel's back."

Liz - I do not understand why there are not protests in the street regarding the rape of our country's future - but also our ideals and morals. They served us ok for a couple of hundred years.

Are we all so obese and Paxil'd that we cannot do something about this? People who are not fringe elements are outraged. We should be.

Yankee