Goldman Sachs

Bernie Sanders’ campaign is right: “Our economy works for Wall Street because it’s rigged by Wall Street. That’s the problem.”

From Four Horsemen:

Famous for once claiming it did God’s work - Goldman Sachs is one of the most influential investment banks in the world. Its alumni often occupy positions of great influence in governments and central banks. In September 2008, barely a month before the stock market crash, Goldman - supposedly a pillar of the free market - changed its banking status from investment to commercial. This meant it was now eligible for state protection. Socialism for the rich, right there.

“Goldman Sachs are extremely efficient at what they do, their task is to make money, they make bank robbers like Willie Sutton look like modest amateurs. They are huge bank robbers, but its legal. The system is set up so they can do it. In recent years they have been selling securities put together from mortgages that they knew were worthless, so they are selling these things to unwitting consumers, making a ton of money out of it, meanwhile they are betting that they are going to fail because they know that what they are peddling is rotten, so they placed bets with credit defaults, and lots of other things with the huge insurance company AIG, and that was insuring Goldman Sachs against the failure of the stuff they are peddling.” - Noam Chomsky

During America’s sub-prime collapse Goldman traders Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum made a $4 billion dollar profit by short selling junk mortgages. Backed by Dan Sparks internally Goldman Sachs called their position “the big short” and betted against their own clients. Senator Carl Levin called Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein to a senate subcommittee to testify under oath:

“Much has been said about the supposedly massive short Goldman Sachs had on the U.S. housing market. The fact is, we were not consistently or significantly net-short the market in residential mortgage-related products in 2007 and 2008. We didn’t have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients.”

Riding the big short in 2007 made billions of dollars for Goldman and so far they’ve got away scot free with this massive heist.