goldman sachs

Give me a G... Goldman Sachs announced today that it plans to cut the rescue loan arranged for CIT Group by $875 million, to just $2.125 billion.

Mark the last 3 days down. Yet another classic. Goldman lowballs the GDP and panicked deflationists sell anything and everything "risk" related and pile into dollars and Treasuries. Then the "inflated" GDP is released, and suddenly risk assets of every race, gender, stripe, color, and ethnic origin are once again embraced.

Janet Tavakoli with some more great quotes ...

"A decline in the value of the dollar is necessary in order compensate for the fact that the US economy will remain rather weak, will be a drag on the global economy. China will emerge as the motor replacing the US consumer and, of course, it’s a smaller motor because the Chinese economy is much smaller. So the world economy will have less of a motor, so it will move forward slower than it has in the last 25 years. But China will be the engine driving it forward and the US will be actually a drag that’s being pulled along through a gradual decline in the value of the dollar." - George Soros

"There is a sense that if you make money you are going to give. Making money, however, is different from stealing money. If you steal the money, you are not expected to give it to a charity my friends. If you steal the money we will take the money back from you, by way of the government, and put you in jail. The American taxpayer in fact has given trillions of dollars, billions directly to Goldman Sachs so that Goldman can use the taxpayer subsidy to play a parlor game and pay themselves record bonuses." - Dylan Ratigan

The following post is a revision of an article I wrote for my blog. The topic is the similarities between the leap of faith that investors took when they gave their money to Bernie Madoff and the leap of faith required of those who currently own and buy shares of Goldman Sachs. Upon some reflection, there are a number of interesting parallels. The data does not include the most recent earnings report, but given another incredible performance this quarter I thought the commentary was still very relevant.

Max Keiser in his prime, discussing whether the crisis is over: "It'd not froth, it's fraud. This is an incredible case of accounting fraud and the American peasants have got to be the stupidest people in the world today: they don't mind becoming peasants, they don't mind living like peasants, and if that's the case, we should do nothing to step them from sliding into a peasant class." And this pearl: "The bankers on Wall Street are the equivalent of suicide bombers in other countries.They threaten to blow themselves up and blow up the economy in exchange for huge bailout money."

Zero Hedge is starting a multi-part overview of Goldman Sachs' Electronic Trading client-focused product suite, to demonstrate just how extensively embedded in modern market architecture are Goldman's various DMA and "liquidity" facilitation schemes, and the depths of dark pool domination via Goldman's global order router, and other specific topical offerings.

It would appear that employees of the NY Post can do more than merely plant stories and spread unfounded rumors. Some of them actually do investigative work. Case in point - John Crudele, who has compiled FOIA reports to create a chronological narrative of Hank Paulson's speed-dialing in the days after the Lehman collapse, in a piece titled "The secret to Goldman Sachs' good fortune." The net result: more communication between Paulson and Blankfein during the heart of the crisis than anyone else (including then-President Bush), with the only exception of Ben Bernanke. Just what were these two people talking about so frequently in the two days when the Dow made an 800 point round trip? And just who was leaking the rumors that ultimately were based on information sourced by Hank Paulson himself? Crudele's chronology presents a relevant framework for analyzing just who the critical decision-makers are in US financial markets. Hopefully one day phone transcripts will be released and the full picture of just what information Blankfein was getting straight from his former boss can be reconstructed.

"[The Fed] is bigger than the Congress, [it] has more power than the Congress. The Fed Chairman probably is more powerful than our president, and yet we refuse to look at it. The time has come for us to look at the Fed" - Ron Paul

"Our salespeople, traders, and other professionals may provide oral or written market commentary or trading strategies to our clients and our proprietary trading desks that reflect opinions that are contrary to the opinions expressed in this research. Our asset management area, our proprietary trading desks and investing businesses may make investment decisions that are inconsistent with the recommendations or views expressed in this research." - Goldman Sachs Research Disclosure

Probably the best performing stock in the S&P today is that of private-jet maker Textron, which received a double whammy of upgrades from taxpayer darlings Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Yesterday, MS upgraded the stock from an Underweight to an Overweight, passing Neutral, and putting a $25 price target on the stock. Today, Goldman, never too far behind, especially in names in which it is significantly axed in CDS and other OTC products, upgraded the Cessna maker from Neutral to Conviction Buy, with a price target increase from $16 to $23.

Per conversations with the NYSE, expect disclosure in early September on who, if any, new entrants into the SLP program are. Based on continuing principal PT data, Goldman can be safe in that it will be picking rebates, and being a "voluntary" market market, with unspecificed balance sheet and risk tolerance requirements, for years to come.

Much has been said about Goldman Sachs by articles like the one Mr. Matt Taibbi wrote and published by Rolling Stone on July 2, 2009 - “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine”. But most have not heard about Goldman Sachs involvement in the initial public offering (IPO) of Baidu (BIDU) and the subsequent BIDU share price movements back in 2005 and 2006.

When you are TheHedgeFund, this is likely the easiest way to pay for bonuses.