Goldman is everywhere

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00.html

Swaps are bad news. Where's Brooksley Born?

i was getting my colonoscopy... and this suit was in the room.. I asked who's that dude? The doctor replied.. .it's goldman banker making sure if any gold pops outta my azz, he gets his cut cause his bank has a CDS tied to gold bullion up ppls butts.

In other news the Obama administration with strong democratic support and that of Paul Krugman reiterated that Greece needs a stimulus package.

Riversider, your biggest problem is you just post economic stories without any knowledge about what you're posting. Hiding debt and deficit levels within the EMU is an Olympic sport which Germany and France have dominated since EMU inception. Everybody knows what's happening, it just takes a dumb German paper and naive Streeteasy posters to really make this any type of news.

It is kind of funny that the one thing saving the United States is that Europe is more messed up than we are.

wow. gs is responsible for everything -- the people/countries signing up for things are slways victims... right?

The gov't a victim. Hardly....

What is worse: out of control spending in 2% of the EU GDP(admittedly one should include more than Greece) or out of control spending in the US (CA is over 10% of US GDP)?

When CA goes bust, methinks the USA has the bigger problem....

"It is kind of funny that the one thing saving the United States is that Europe is more messed up than we are."

Yep. The only thing propping up the dollar is the inherent weakness of the pound and the euro. Otherwise, we'd be in freefall. Someday, when the yuan is an accepted, freely floating, freely exchangeable currency, the dollar will crash to oblivion.

Naked Capitalism had a great quote,

"Yves here. This is why I am dubious of customized OTC derivatives (as opposed to plain vanilla products, like most interest rate and currency swaps). Their main uses are regulatory arbitrage, per above (generally with very rich fees attached) or to shift risk onto chumps."

"It is kind of funny that the one thing saving the United States is that Europe is more messed up than we are."

Granted, we're a lot of the reason they're screwed up....

Goldman Sachs and other banks should give up their bank status if they want to avoid the ban on proprietary trading proposed by the White House, Paul Volcker, head of President Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said.

“The implication for Goldman Sachs or any other institution is, do you want to be a bank?” Mr Volcker said in a video interview video interview with the Financial Times. “If you don’t want to follow those [banking] rules, you want to go out and do a lot of proprietary stuff, fine, but don’t do it with a banking licence.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/former-goldman-trading-stratgist-of-course-goldman-traders-use-knowledge-of-client-trades-to-make-money-2010-2

Narrator: But consider HOW they're making those bucks, says Nomi Prins. On knowledge that, as when she was there, comes in with every trade a client asks Goldman to make.

Nomi Prins: And just by evidence from the profits they make and where they make them, what divisions they make them in, they’re not sitting on that knowledge. They are trading on that knowledge.

Paul Solomon: So they know somebody is going to buy a commodity or currency so they either buy that commodity or currency first or a commodity and currency very much like it.

Nomi Prins: Any information that you get, particularly if it’s going to move the markets a lot, is going to filter into the trading positions you take.

Narrator: But isn't this "front running" -- trading ahead of your clients (to profit from the price changes that will come from the clients’ trades) for your OWN firm's benefit? And isn't that, strictly speaking, illegal?

David Stockman: The long and ancient secret of Wall Street is they’ve always been front running their clients! In other words when you’re in the customer trading business and then you’re in the proprietary business, which trade are you making first? I don’t know and if it’s in milliseconds how’s anybody going to figure it out? So I don’t know if you ought to get all exercised on that or not but the fact they make all this money in proprietary trading is clearly part and parcel of being a massive player and dealer in the markets for both customer trades and house trades.