"... the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!"

[marmar]

via MichaelMoore.com:



April 25th, 2010 9:04 AM

E-mails show Goldman boasting as meltdown unfolds
By Dan Strumpf / Associated Press


NEW YORK – E-mails released Saturday morning show top executives at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. boasting about the money the firm was making as the national housing market collapsed in 2007.

The e-mails suggest Goldman benefited from its bets that securities backed by subprime mortgages would lose value.

"Of course we didn't dodge the mortgage mess," CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote in an e-mail dated Nov. 18, 2007, according to the e-mails released Saturday by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts."

Goldman restated its position Saturday that it did not reap huge profit from bets against the market.

....(snip)....

Separately Saturday, Goldman released a series of e-mails from Fabrice Tourre, the trader at the heart of the SEC charges. In them, Tourre jokes about selling investments to "widows and orphans" when he already expects the market to go bust.

He writes in an e-mail dated March 7, 2007, that Dan Sparks, leader of Goldman's U.S. subprime business, said the business "is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!" ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/e-mails-show-goldman-boasting-meltdown-unfolds

[xchrom]

1. Recommend -- there are some 'liberals'

Who keep blaming the victims.

This makes that notion all the more interesting.

'Widows and orphans' indeed.

[chill_wind]

5. Taibbi had a great piece to this effect in The Guardian yesterday.

Last summer I wrote a brutally negative article about Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine (I called the bank a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity") that unexpectedly sparked a heated national debate. On one side of the debate were people like me, who believed that Goldman is little better than a criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking the market, the government, and even its own clients in a bewildering variety of complex financial scams.

On the other side of the debate were the people who argued Goldman wasn't guilty of anything except being "too smart" and really, really good at making money. This side of the argument was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they look like to me, but idealised heroes, the saviours of society.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/24/will-goldman-prove-greed-is-god

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. K&R

[girl gone mad]

3. I've always maintained..

the banks knew exactly what they were doing.

[tblue37]

4. It reminds me of the Enron staffers who joked about

cutting Grandma's electricity off in California during their Enron-engineered energy crisis.

[CoffeeCat]

6. If we look at the "factory"...that these banks...

...had set up---the first part of process was getting more and more people
to take out subprime mortgages, or mortgages that featured crazy-creative
financing.

The second part of the process was when the banks rolled those
risky mortgages into securities with loans from less-risky consumers.

The third phase, was getting a AAA rating tacked onto those securities.

The forth phase was selling these securities on the secondary markets and making
billions and billions off of this junk.

The final phase was shorting the whole mess and making billions more---THEN
crying, "Boo! Hoo! We're going to collapse because of this mess! Help
us! Help us!! We need billions!"

I hate it when people shout on the Internet, but sometimes it's warranted. THESE
CRIMINALS ORCHESTRATED EVERY STEP OF THIS PROCESS. IT WAS A WELL-OILED MACHINE,
THAT WOULD MAKE THEM BILLIONS. IT ALL HINGED ON THEM PUSHING ALL KINDS OF MORTGAGES
ON THE UNSUSPECTING CONSUMERS. THEIR PLOT REQUIRED THAT THEY SELL AS MANY MORTGAGES
AS POSSIBLE. NO MATTER WHAT THE COST TO SOCIETY OR TO US CITIZENS.

It's so awful to even contemplate what they've done.