It's a shell game and only the insiders know where the shells are. Invest and they will find a way to steal your shells and you will retire on a broken promise.

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, the two big crooks in the USA. With the Rothchild's and a few others we're screwed. They can control markets, make money up and down and take out their competition and if things really go badly they force the "government" to "bail them out". Nice racket if you can get it! These guys run the world in the west and backed Communist China to it's rapid rise. Money talks, BS walks. Hail David Rockefeller, the Godfather who owned Cheney and has Obama right under his thumb.

This is not profit this is called bail out money, they are playing the people of the world.
When it comes bonus time again the profit will not be there any more and they will ask for more US bail out money ( your money ) that they don't pay back must feed the beast.

All said is true except for one omitted detail. The market is up today about 1.5%.

The overall market is capitalized at $40 trillion dollars.

The purpose of supporting the financial system with all its unfairness is that today Goldman-Sachs led the market higher by $600 billion. If world markets follow suit and the global markets find stability then the feds efforts, however jaded, were a good investment, and world wide might see $2 trillion in gains today. This means greater liquidity in the market, stronger employment, and a faster recovery.

We could have just as easily seen a poor showing at GS and lost $600 billion today.

One other point. Many of the leading companies in the world are US based. That number is diminishing all the time. Goldman-Sachs is no less corrupt than UBS which received $170 billion in support from the Swiss government. I am all for maintaing US leadership in investment banking if we can!

Disclosure: I do not own any shares of GS, AIG, or any other investment bank.

Yes.
If only average Americans could use a few million or billion in taxpayer money to gamble in the markets, then pay it back and keep the profit.
Only GS can do that while the rest of America burns.

www.compdivplan.com

13 billion of the 2 billion profit is from USA taxpayers via AIG ... WHAT A DISGRACE a Bernie Madoff scam company tapping USA Taxpayers.

What happened to 4.2 billion stock funded off shore account AIG Greenbergh raided several years ago ?

I think Sheldon's got it right, and like it or not, this a "pay to play" world. If the big players don't get theirs first, us smaller ones will lose the benefits of what trickles down to us from them, and sometimes that means the loss of our entire sources of livlihood....

If only we could all receive TARP money to gamble with!

One more thing to consider.

What happens if we say screw GS and AIG and JPM while the Swiss, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Emerites, and other governments are supporting their banks and investment companies at the same time.

Simple, they prosper and they take market share and even dominate while we willingly pass the baton to them. We complain that foreign governments are giving their institutions unfair help while refusing to do the same.

The stock market only represents big business but trillions more are gained by extension to the restaurants, supermarkets, shoe stores and everything else that benefits from a vibrant economy. It is not just a trickle down theory. Profits are the economies lubricant -- keeping food on the table and heat in the furnace.

This would be depressing news if it was something new. Of course, Henry Paulson was a Goldman Sachs alum and G. W. Bush's Treasury guru. So what can we expect? He was also the architect of the original bailout plan under Bush to extort over $700 billion in taxpayer money to dole out to his special friends in the financial industry. The kicker to that plan was the he would have sole control of that money and there could be no oversight or accountability either to congress or the incoming administration as to how and where the money would be distributed.

Who says there is no honor among thieves? They sure know how to take care of their own.

we need to stop the bad loans and stop the taxpayer gouging at the same time.....NOW!

Sheldon,

I understand what you are saying in that Goldman causes the overall market to rise and therefore we should be happy because this profit will trickle down, but it is a totally misguided opinion.

You are saying that we should accept the total and outright corruption because that is just the way it is and we should deal with it. A better way would be for no stock market to exist. Then for the real economy to function the real people will have to buy and sell real goods for profit rather than make phony manipulated trades to gain wealth.

I could put an oil well on my property and pull a few barrels out. I should be able to sell this for whatever I want. Maybe $25 a barrel. I'd walk down to the local Marathon refinery and say, hey you want to buy some oil for $25. I set my price and the buyer decides whether or not he wants to pay it. That is the way the economy is supposed to work. Goldman and the rest of the market manipulators rig the game so you are forced to sell for what they decide and buy for what they decided, even though they are not in or know anything about the actual business they influence. See the only business they are in is to make as much cash as possible for themselves, not to help and single average person make a living. Goldman and in extension the entire equity market system is the arch enemy on the free market capitalist system.

The definition of a free market is that the producer and buyer set their own contract free of outside influence. The purest market is where a person produces a product with their own two hands and trades it to another person for something produced by his hands for an agreed exchange. The trades through the stock market are the furthest thing from this pure free market ideal. A trader at Goldman most likely doesn't even know or care what product actually trades hands to produce profit, only that the profit can be shown to exist.

In nearly every case that profit number is manipulated so many times that the end result is nowhere near the truth of the actual transaction. A person may have traded the most valued parcel of land in the world for a few beads but through tricks of accounting that trade can be made to look as if those beads are the most valuable little pieces of rock in the world, as long as a broker at Goldman says so.

You are very very wrong about the trillions in profits to the mega investment houses trickling down to the restaurants and shoe companies. Maybe the ones that cater to the Wall Street brokers, but that is far from trillions. What about outside of New York City? There are millions of square miles that rely on the average person walking in and buying a greasy hamburger and a $40 pair of shoes.

In the world today real hard work is worth nothing and the ability to manipulate is worth all the gold. Your company may have existed for 100 years making screws. They you are bought out by some broker deal to increase stock leverage for one quarter then sold off to a giant conglomerate. They in turn fire 75% of the workforce and move the company overseas. You and your family could have lived just fine for the next 40 years but some big shot at an investment firm needed a deal to pump up his numbers to get a multi million dollar bonus.

"Profits are the economies lubricant -- keeping food on the table and heat in the furnace." What an elitist thing to say. Profits are the lubricant for the doors of bank vaults, not the economy. None of the profits from Goldman Sachs finds its way to the average $40k earning man in Nebraska. What matters to him is a market free of manipulation so he can make his own path to a good and fulfilling life. He doesn't care about getting a $250k bonus on top of his $500k salary. To him $50k and a nice pickup truck is just fine.

What is better? A Wall Street brokerage generating billions in profits shared between a few hundred people or a factory that employs a few thousand people and supported by thousands more.

The factory is more important by a factor far larger than can be comprehended. Goldman Sachs is the least important institution to the world that holds the most influence on it. Everything would be better if Goldman Sachs disappeared. Well maybe not the men’s store a block away from Wall Street that sells $15,000 suits and $5,000 shoes, but Marty's Diner across from the Ford Engine plant sure would be.

SO really you are just propping up a corrupt institution and a corrupt system because it benefits you personally. If that system were to fall you and your friends would have to find a new way to make a living. I would much rather see a few hundred brokers and investment advocates out of work than 7500 factory workers in Ohio. I think those factory workers have a much greater impact on the economy than you give them credit for.

Most people are clueless as to how company's like Goldman Sachs makes money. I'm sure they have had some legit financial purpose in the past and served a real, albeit overly compensated financial role. However, their role and behavior has become clouded by a tsunami of financial BS. Company's like Goldman are the problem, not the solution. It appears, that all the really big money these investment banking company's like Goldman make is accomplished mostly with financial "smoke and mirrors." Apparently they can put together huge multi billion dollar (BS) deals with no foundation in economic reality. They simply invent products and ersatz financial instruments that no one except they themselves and other company of the same ilk understand and then they sell, trade and exchange this shit and make tons of money in the process. In the meantime, these inventions and questionable financial instruments, regardless of what they want to call them, later turn out to be worthless having no basis in economic reality. The ones left holding the bag are the taxpayers. These clowns then get bailed out at the taxpayers expense. They then pay themselves huge multimillion dollar bonuses as a reward...for what? This is quite a racket.