By Andrew Henry
Newsmax
The top donor to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs, received over $10 billion in emergency lending and bailouts from the Federal Reserve after the 2008 financial meltdown, according to public sources and published reports.
Goldman backed Obama for election in 2008, and the firm, like many Wall Street institutions, is now backing Mitt Romney for president.
Romney has long had a close relationship with Goldman Sachs. In 1999 Romney purchased initial IPO shares in Goldman that netted him $1.1 million in profits when he sold them in 2010.
And The New York Times recently reported that “many of the assets in Romney’s blind trust” are managed by Goldman.
Today, Goldman is Romney’s largest donor.
And nine of Romney’s top 20 campaign contributors are big Wall Street Banks like Goldman. But Goldman leads all Romney contributors, having donated $367,200 to his campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Six of those nine top contributors received over $161 billion in taxpayer bailouts, reports ProPublica, the independent, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative organization.
Goldman doesn’t contribute directly to candidates like Romney, but does so through its employees.
Romney’s ties to Goldman have already become a campaign issue. During Thursday’s CNN debate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stated that Romney profited from millions he invested in a Goldman Sachs fund that relied heavily on investments in the mortgage-backed securities linked to the 2008 implosion on Wall Street. Romney said he personally didn’t direct the investment, which he said was made through his trust.
Still, Romney’s close ties with Goldman will continue to nag his campaign.
ProPublica says that the The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., received over $782 million in emergency lending from the Federal Reserve. On Jan. 17, the investigative site reported that the total of taxpayer bailouts received by Goldman tallied a whopping $10 billion.
The relationship between Goldman and Romney goes far beyond its patronage of his campaign. The firm has reportedly managed significant assets of Romney’s in his blind trust.
Read more on Newsmax.com: Romney Backed by Goldman Sachs, Bailout Banks
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Romney’s relationship with Goldman dates back at least to 1999, when he purchased 7,000 shares of Goldman’s initial public offering. The release of those shares was tightly held, and were largely unavailable to ordinary investors.
According to a May 1999 BusinessWeek story, “few of the public shareholders were folks who happened to be lucky enough to snare a few shares.”
One potential political landmine for Romney: Personal financial disclosures from May 2011 indicating he and his family invested millions in a Goldman Sachs fund that invested heavily in mortgage-backed debt obligations.
There have been growing indications that Romney’s ties to Wall Street would be subjected to intense scrutiny in a general election campaign especially the Goldman Sachs fund he invested in that benefited from the housing collapse.
Romney’s disclosure forms show that he invested between $1 and $5 million in the fund, and his wife Ann invested another $1 million plus.
The report is based on Romney’s May 2011 personal financial disclosures, which indicates significant investments in the “Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund (institutional class).” Approximately 24.5 percent of that fund is reportedly invested in mortgage-backed obligations.
Romney’s profit taking through his Goldman fund investment remains a sensitive subject in Florida, one of the states hardest hit by the housing meltdown. Romney’s Goldman fund invested in some of the biggest culprits in the housing meltdown, including Bear Stearns, Countrywide, IndyMac and Washington Mutual.
In October, Romney ran into trouble on the foreclosure issue, when suggested the remedy to the turmoil in the real estate market is “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”
On Tuesday, Romney stood before a foreclosed home and promised a small crowd of Floridians that he would encourage financial institutions to help homeowners. But he also partially defended banking institutions’ role in the mortgage crisis.
“In this case, it’s because of the banks,” he said, according to a FoxNews.com report. “Well, the banks aren’t bad people. They’re just overwhelmed.”
By comparison, only one of the top 20 contributors to GOP rival Newt Gingrich’s campaign is a bank: Wells Fargo donated $5,900 to the Gingrich campaign through Sept. 30.
Then-candidate Barack Obama received strong support from Wall Street in the 2008 cycle. But so far this cycle, the only financial institution listed among his top 20 donors is Goldman Sachs. It contributed $50,124 to his re-election campaign.
Analysts say Wall Street’s lackluster financial support for the president’s reelection campaign reflects the pinch they’re feeling on profits due to the Dodd-Frank financial regulations reforms he has championed.
Read more on Newsmax.com: Romney Backed by Goldman Sachs, Bailout Banks
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!
Showing posts with label Bank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bank. Show all posts
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Monday, October 10, 2011
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Examples of U.S. Financial Corruption
9 October 2011
Examples of U.S. Financial Corruption
- Most gold is traded on the markets and is not backed by the actual metal itself. When people think that they are buying gold, they are actually buying pieces of paper that say that they own gold, while being charged storage fees to store the gold. Insiders reveal that the London Bullion Market Association has approximately a hundred times more gold deposits than actual gold bullion.
- Joe Cassano to helped bring down AIG is getting away scott free and can keep the millions in profits that he made in the process.
- Goldman Sachs denies "betting against clients"...the Wall Street bank issues eight-page letter to shareholders justifying its conduct before, during and after the financial crisis.
The eight-page letter, signed by chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn, also contained a detailed defence of the $12.9bn (£8.5bn) payout which Goldman received from AIG after the failed insurance giant was bailed out by the US government. Goldman had helped to fuel the housing boom during the last decade by packaging hundreds of millions of dollars worth of housing loans into complicated financial products such as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). "These CDOs were sold on to other banks and investors such as pension funds, who suffered big losses when the sub-prime housing bubble burst. Goldman, though, actually profited from the fiasco by short-selling the market before the credit crunch." (The guardian)
Goldman was the biggest beneficiary from the US government's bailout of AIG in autumn 2008. Goldman claimed at the time that its exposure to AIG was "immaterial", but in March 2009 it emerged that it actually received $12.9bn of the $44bn handed to various counterparties who had taken out insurance contracts with AIG. Goldman said that $4.8bn of the money was paid in return for securities which could otherwise have been sold for the same price, while $2.5bn covered existing debts owed because of the deteriorating market.
Another $5.8bn was handed over to settle credit default swaps, or insurance contracts, on the CDOs that had helped to create the crisis.
- Goldman Sachs made billions of dollars from the economic collapse:
Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.
Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.
Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.
Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.
-Data analysed by the Wall Street Journal found that 18 major banks were, on average, able to reduce debt levels used to fund securities tradesby 42pc over the last five quarters using repurchase agreements, also known as “repo” trades. Under certain circumstances, some repurchase trades can be booked as “sales” and used to reduce debt.
The assessment, based on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, highlights the extent to which advanced accounting is still in use, even in the wake of the crippling financial crisis.
In Lehman’s case, the court-appointed investigator’s report into the bank’s September 2008 downfall found that the bank had used “Repo 105” – the name given to the technique within the bank – to significantly mask its borrowing, so decreasing its apparent risk profile.
According to the report, the ruse allowed Lehman to claim its liabilities were $50bn (£33bn) lower than they actually were by May 2008, just months before the bank collapsed. (The Telegraph)
- The Federal Reserve bought up a majority of U.S. government debt in 2009, likened to printing money out of thin air. Some call it a Ponzi scheme.
- The Federal Reserve holds credit-default swaps on the debt of Florida schools and debt owned by the states of California and Nevada. This will turn into a huge profit if the states default on the debt. Isn't this a conflict of interest?
- record bonuses during and after the financial crisis...and continues.
- We may not know much about what is going on inside some of these banks, but they sure do know a lot about us. For example, it has been revealed that the data mining operations of the major credit card companies are becoming so sophisticated that they can actually predict how likely you are to get a divorce. (The Daily Beast)
The Movement: Occupy Wall St.
Resources:
Occupy Together
Twitter: @occupywallst
Related Articles:
Making Sense of the Bank of America Mortgage Fraud
Making Sense of the Failing Economy and U.S. Downgrade
Debt Plan Fact Sheet
Our Tax Dollars at Work
Satellite View of Foreclosures
American Struggling Middle Class (Video)
Global Confidence in Economy Collapses
Crime Against Humanity
Examples of US Financial Corruption
Presidential Candidates Response to Occupy Wall Street
One Example of Wall Street Corruption
Occupy Wall Street - Proposed/Unproposed List of Demands
What is Wall Street?
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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