It's disheartening to read this:
[B]anksters giving their right to loot their companies top priority, and the greater fool public be damned, with Goldman the most egregious sinner. That firm’s self serving protestations to the contrary, it was a ward of the state, and would not exist now were it not for the munificence of taxpayers. It continues to profit from a raft of subsidies, ranging from FDIC guaranteed debt, a whole alphabet soup of special Fed facilities, and super low interest rates. As Linda Beale points out:
A recent study suggests that big banks in the TBTF category now enjoy a significant cost-of-funds spread compared to other banks. That is, they can borrow money more cheaply, leading to greater ability to make profits, than can other banks, because of the implicit guarantee that the federal government will step in and save them because they are TBTF and pose a systemic risk. That advantage may amount to as much as 48% of the TBTF banks’ profits this year (or as ‘little’ as 9%, on very conservative assumptions). The government, by the way, gets nothing for this implicit guarantee–unlike a commercial guarantor, it is not being paid a regular premium for the service.
So a significant portion of Goldman and other big bank profits are effectively windfall profits due to government largesse. And they are paying themselves bonuses on it...
Goldman, per the Independent, is out, as usual, to have its cake and eat it too, to enjoy the benefits of all the rescue subsidies but not bear the related tool:
Goldman Sachs has threatened the UK Treasury with plans to move up to 20 per cent of its London-based staff [where there is a proposal to levy a supertax on financial institution bonuses] to Spain in a standoff over tax and bonuses.
And watch this
Watch CBS News Videos Online
In the same day and not feel violently ill.
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