Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The Quiet Coup
(May 2009)
I finally read Simon Johnson's article, The Quiet Coup from the May issue of The Atlantic. Excellent article on the economic crisis and what it will take to get out of it.
4 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Johnson wrote a nice polite academic piece, but it falls way short of the mark, and the complete truth of the root cause of the recent financial meltdown.
I recommend Tabbi's piece on Goldman Sachs (see link below) for a more complete picture. It echoes some of Johnson's points (in fact it even mentions Johnson's article), but it gets down and dirty and provids the details lacking in Johnson's piece.
As I have suspected for months now, it is apparent that Goldman's best recent invesment was betting early and heavily on a longshot horse named Barry.
Change you can believe in...my ass.
The Goldman Sachs people are freakin briliant. I'll give them that. But just because they're smart doesn't mean they are not speculators, manipulators, and criminals.
Goldman Sachs has become the Oligarch of Oligarchs in the west, with no one to stop them. They decide who wins and who loses, and by how much, all the while taking their taste ("wet their beak").
Me thinks the next GS scam will be cap and trade. I really haven't paid much attention to it, as it didn't make much sense to me (being a scientist and all).
Funny, I don't remember cap and trade as being needed to control other pollutants (e.g., NOx, SOx, Lead, DDT, nitrates, phosphates, mercury, etc....). Why not just regulate the emission, or the cost of carbon, through tax measures.
Why is it necessary to create a market, and give a market to GS to manipulate.
Somewhere, I read that GS has spent millions ($4,000,000) for lobbying cap and trade.
This creates an unnecessary market for exploitation that we all end up paying for.
When did Goldman Sachs suddenly become so concerned about environmental issues. They are now that there is potentially billions in short-term money to be made.
From Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone piece -
"Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected."
4 comments:
Johnson wrote a nice polite academic piece, but it falls way short of the mark, and the complete truth of the root cause of the recent financial meltdown.
I recommend Tabbi's piece on Goldman Sachs (see link below) for a more complete picture. It echoes some of Johnson's points (in fact it even mentions Johnson's article), but it gets down and dirty and provids the details lacking in Johnson's piece.
As I have suspected for months now, it is apparent that Goldman's best recent invesment was betting early and heavily on a longshot horse named Barry.
Change you can believe in...my ass.
The Goldman Sachs people are freakin briliant. I'll give them that. But just because they're smart doesn't mean they are not speculators, manipulators, and criminals.
Goldman Sachs has become the Oligarch of Oligarchs in the west, with no one to stop them. They decide who wins and who loses, and by how much, all the while taking their taste ("wet their beak").
They might as well rename the firm - "Our Thing".
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/7
I'll read the Tabbi article (I generally like him) but note this list of Goldman contributions.
Thanks for the link.
Nice numbers, but what do you think they mean, and what do you think all that money buys?
Me thinks the next GS scam will be cap and trade. I really haven't paid much attention to it, as it didn't make much sense to me (being a scientist and all).
Funny, I don't remember cap and trade as being needed to control other pollutants (e.g., NOx, SOx, Lead, DDT, nitrates, phosphates, mercury, etc....). Why not just regulate the emission, or the cost of carbon, through tax measures.
Why is it necessary to create a market, and give a market to GS to manipulate.
Somewhere, I read that GS has spent millions ($4,000,000) for lobbying cap and trade.
This creates an unnecessary market for exploitation that we all end up paying for.
When did Goldman Sachs suddenly become so concerned about environmental issues. They are now that there is potentially billions in short-term money to be made.
From Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone piece -
"Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected."
and so it goes.....
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