Goldman (and other banks') "Hedges"

[Subdivisions]

From Market Ticker:

There is a rumor about Goldman Sachs flying around on the street - allegedly they are about to report their second-best quarter in history, +$12 billion or so.

In addition, there is http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a3v8O6IgHva4&refer=home">this from Bloomberg:

A 47 percent gain for the company’s stock price this year and a return to profitability in the first quarter may help Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein raise new money, analysts said. That might let Goldman Sachs, the sixth-biggest bank, return the cash received in October from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and shake off compensation and hiring restrictions imposed on banks that took the U.S. aid.

Gee, you don't think being paid by the taxpayer through AIG's "conduit" for losses that didn't (yet) happen at 100 cents on the dollar might have anything to do with that, do you?

And further (and potentially much worse) there is the repeated statement by Goldman executives that they were "fully hedged" against a potential counterparty default by AIG.

One wonders - was that "hedge" to be short the equity on AIG itself, perhaps?

Why is this important?

Because if that's how Goldman hedged they got paid twice and the taxpayer literally got robbed.

-snip-

http://market-ticker.org/archives/953-Goldman-and-other-banks-Hedges.html

Is Goldman Sachs an arm of the US government or is the US government an arm of Goldman Sachs?

When will this madness end and when will someone go to jail for this rampant fraud?

[notesdev]

1. So their profit is almost exactly equal

to the amount of taxpayer money laundered to them through AIG and other avenues.

In other words, their primary business has become stealing from taxpayers.

At some point organizations like this need to be declared enemies of the nation and handled appropriately.

[Subdivisions]

2. Yup. They've stolen at least $12 Billion dollars of taxpayer money and

they are going to declare that money as their Q1 profit.

And, as Denninger describes,

If in fact Goldman (or anyone else) was "hedged" against a possible credit loss from their CDS with AIG and they were able to collect on that hedge (no matter what it was) those payments through AIG need to be clawed back immediately as nobody is entitled to be paid twice for the same risk and reap what amounts to a windfall profit by quite literally engineering a multi-billion dollar transfer of funds from the Taxpayer to the firm!

[glitch]

3. Another snip from your post:

"We the people deserve answers on this right now and if persons in our government handed these banks $100 billion dollars of our tax money for what was a covered bet, allowing them to collect twice on a risk that had not yet been realized (when at most they were entitled to collect once via their private hedging activity) every single person involved in that scandal must be immediately removed from office, prosecuted if possible, and every nickel of those funds must be clawed back by whatever means are necessary."

[LeftHandPath]

4. Goldman Sachs is a criminal organization...

and they own a good portion of our government.

Its time we do away with this group of criminals, whether it gets done by our government or by some other means is yet to be seen, but Goldman is going down.