AIG - America's 'Bad Bank' - Goldman & Others America's Special Interest?

[WhiskeyGirl]

Stocks in Europe, Asia Advance as Goldman Sachs Posts Profit

...Goldman Sachs Group Inc. beat analysts’ estimates...

...Barclays Plc and BNP Paribas SA advanced more than 8 percent...

...lenders from Citigroup Inc. to Bank of America Corp. said they made money in the first two months...

...The Goldman Sachs results suggest “things are getting back to normal,” he told Bloomberg Television...

...BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, gained 8 percent...

What do the non TARP and AIG bailouts look like?

U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher said “grim” figures indicate the world’s largest economy shrank steeply last quarter.

“The economic data in the U.S. is quite grim, and I expect a contraction at a very dazzling rate in the first quarter,” Fisher said in a speech today in Hong Kong.

“We are not really looking into the abyss any longer,” said Sandro Merino, the Zurich-based head of European wealth management research at UBS AG. “We are moving away from fearing a depression scenario,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

Who is "we"?  U.S. taxpayers?  How long with US taxpayers be in debt to pay for all this corporate prosperity?  A transfer of risk?  Responsibility?   

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aKzG6obChMCQ&refer=europe

I'm still waiting for my billion dollar bailout.

What did Goldman and the others do to make this money?  Is this profit at taxpayer expense?

Investment banker welfare?

jmho

[WhiskeyGirl]

In France, BNP Paribas rose 7.1%, Societe Generale added 7% and Credit Agricole shares climbed 6.9%.

In Germany, shares in Commerzbank rose 10.5% while Deutsche Bank added 4.7%.

Wells Fargo, another big US bank, announced that it would make a profit of $3bn (£2bn) for the first three months of 2009.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7997800.stm

This is special dealing, pure and simple. Even if AIG needed to be salvaged (there was considerable agreement on this point), having Goldman deeply involved in the process is cronyism. But that's been a staple of this Administration.

...Goldman, a Wall Street stalwart that had seemed immune to its rivals’ woes, was A.I.G.’s largest trading partner, according to six people close to the insurer who requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. A collapse of the insurer threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman’s side, several of these people said.....

...Goldman had $45 billion of equity as of its last balance sheet date. A loss, if it approached $20 billion, in this general environment of worries about financial firms, would have sent Goldman shares into a tailspin...

How much money did Goldman (and others) take from AIG?  Why didn't Goldman and others take a 'haircut'?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/09/aig-bailout-saved-goldman.html

[WhiskeyGirl]

Profit on the backs of future Americans?  Generational theft?

The Real AIG Scandal
It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.

...go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall.

...they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold...

Some would call these 'sophisticated instruments' - 'simple gambling debts'. - mo

...who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

Wow.  All those folks are suddenly profitable!!!  Who's paying the price?  The folks that made all the money on those profits?  Taxpayers.   

...aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

Maybe Goldman and others have suffered more than the rest of us?

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

http://www.slate.com/id/2213942/

Has AIG been set up as a "BAD BANK"?  A BANK sucking up the success and prosperity of future generations?  Is AIG profitable this quarter?  I'll guess it isn't, it's mostly owned by taxpayers.

Is there a transparency site on the web to show everyone in America where their tax dollars are going?  A site detailing all the transactions?  The selling off of assets?

Taxpayers being taken for a ride?  Setup to fail?

jmho