Working Life

Hey, no big deal — you run a company rife with conflicts of interest, you help crater the economy, costing millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth…and you keep racking up more and more money. Life is good for Lloyd Blankfein.

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You don’t have to look further than the utterly pathetic game of repeated “stay-out-of-jail” cards handed the global banker elite to understand why people are pissed—whether in the U.S., Greece or pick a country. Time after time, the guys who cratered the economy, and robbed people of their jobs and wealth, are given a pass [...]

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   It would be an interesting exercise to add up all the dollars spent by the Justice Department prosecuting Roger Clemens and John Edwards–it’s got to be in eight figures easily–compared to the ZERO spent prosecuting Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, or for that matter, a whole host of his co-horts.    I mention Blankfein, [...]

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   I get ginned up as much as the next person when I read about any government action against the financial institutions that robbed millions of people of their jobs and retirement–and their dignity and respect. But, in some way, this is a game.    Unless the heads of these institutions go to jail, nothing [...]

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    I think Carl Levin knows the dance underway. His investigation into the financial meltdown is over. He has forwarded his findings to the Justice Department for civil or criminal action. And, now, I suspect he thinks there will be an attempt to bury the whole mess–and the specific role Goldman Sachs played in the [...]

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   It never ends. The robbery of the great wealth of the nation. The Audacity of Greed of the CEO class is never quenched. On Friday, I wrote about the huge pay increases sweeping through the CEO class in the financial community. It’s a cancer that is spreading again everywhere. Let me start with this [...]

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   The answer is no, I’m not surprised. But, we must never lose the sense of outrage or simply shrug because "it’s just the way it is". Never. The absolute Audacity of Greed has to be challenged every moment.    In the Financial Times today: Jamie Dimon underlined Wall Street’s return to health after the [...]

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   Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amusing that the government is relying on Lloyd Blankfein to finger someone else for illegal behavior: As a witness for the government, Mr. Blankfein testified that Mr. Gupta violated Goldman policies when he allegedly gave Galleon Group hedge-fund founder Raj Rajaratnam information he learned [...]

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As the dust has settled a bit from last week’s slap-on-the-wrist to Goldman Sachs, it’s worth making this point again: nothing much has changed.   After the first few hours of the news that Goldman would pay $550 million to make the SEC go away, it became pretty clear that the government had nicked Goldman [...]

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  If I was Lloyd Blankfein and you told me that I could pockets hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, play a key role in a scam that cost millions of people their jobs, sent the economy into one of the worst economic tailspins in a half century, escape any personal jail time for [...]

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    Even investors are now starting to distance themselves from Goldman Sachs: After reports on Thursday evening that federal prosecutors had opened an investigation into trading at Goldman, raising the possibility of criminal charges against the Wall Street giant, the firm’s stock was downgraded on Friday by two analysts. Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating [...]

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   And the next shoe to drop: Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading, people familiar with the probe say. The investigation from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is at a preliminary stage, stemmed from a [...]

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   The Senate hearings made clear: Goldman Sachs—and other Wall Street firms—profited by gambling with the American peoples’ livelihoods. It was a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” scam. As Sen. Carl Levin memorably stated: “You knew it was a shitty deal, and that’s what your emails showed.”     But, what Levin and other [...]

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   Over the weekend we learned this: In late 2007 as the mortgage crisis gained momentum and many banks were suffering losses, Goldman Sachs executives traded e-mail messages saying that they were making "some serious money" betting against the housing markets.   The e-mails, released Saturday morning by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, appear [...]

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   I will have a lot more to say next week about the whole executive compensation issue and how it fits into the larger picture of our economy. But, for today, I think we should not get too excited about this news: Bowing to calls for restraint in tough economic times, Goldman said that its [...]

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   This caught my eye this morning: Some of the largest shareholders in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have urged the Wall Street firm to reduce the size of its bonus pool, arguing that it should pass along more of its blockbuster earnings to investors, according to people familiar with the situation. The investors hold tens [...]

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