
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle - chaostheory
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/
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btilly
The sad thing about the banker's bonuses is that if they honestly tried to
mark to market all of the bad debt that is still on their books they actually
_lost_ money last year.

The only way they can justify the whole profit/bonus story is because they are
lying to themselves about their real financial situation. And unfortunately
their lies will impact the rest of us as that bad debt turns out to be the
garbage that it is.

------
rrhyne
If Matt Taibbi wrote an article on a stick of poo and mailed it to me, I'd
still read every word.

~~~
cynicalkane
I find the idea of Matt Taibbi writing articles made of poo to be
metaphorically appropriate.

It depresses me that these screeds find a place on this website. It should be
obvious, by the tone, polemical nature, and carefully arranged blindness of
the above article, that no valuable or contextually useful information could
be got out of it.

It further puzzles me that it has become trendy to attack the financial
market's most successful and profitable large institution. This proto-Marxist
sentiment has no place in a free society. The only people forced to trade with
Goldman were taxpayers financing the bailouts, and you know what happened to
them? They got all their money back _plus twenty-three percent interest_.

~~~
Snark7
Actually Matt Taibbi is, apparently, one of the very few members of the press
to have the intelligence, motivation, and opportunity to attack Goldman
repeatedly. Everyone else is on a 24-hour news cycle, and as far as I can
tell, Blankfein taking the $9 million bonus effectively defused the situation,
especially after it was leaked that his bonus could be $100 million. Setting
this up and getting the press to report the relatively low bonus was a
brilliant PR coup, and it appears to have worked.

That being said, I don't have any issue with his efforts at muckraking - I
believe in freedom of the press after all.

~~~
cynicalkane
That makes him a fanatic, but it doesn't say anything about his correctness.

The other thing is that, though I'm sure Goldman's decision was partially PR-
motivated, it's what they should be doing anyway.

~~~
rrhyne
Pulling back on Loyd's bonus was a substance-less ploy. They received over
tens of billion in bailouts, plus loans at 0% on MY dime, plus 100% in payouts
on 5.9b on a bankrupt company. Because if this, they posted 13b in profits and
paid out 16 billion in bonuses.

Do the math and they should be out of business. Instead our corporate
socialist state (fascism) paid those bonuses with my taxes.

