{"id":184860,"date":"2012-01-02T18:33:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-02T23:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/01\/02\/matt-taibbi-is-right-2\/"},"modified":"2012-01-02T18:33:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-02T23:33:00","slug":"matt-taibbi-is-right-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/01\/02\/matt-taibbi-is-right-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Taibbi is Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/blogs\/taibblog\/goldmans-latest-boiler-room-stock-america-20120102\">the Vampire Squid recommends a buy, sell as fast as you can<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It seems Jim O&#8217;Neill, the head of Goldman&#8217;s Asset Management  department, is predicting that the United States stock market may go up  &#8220;15 to 20 percent.&#8221; O&#8217;Neill apparently believes Ben Bernanke and the  Federal Reserve will resort to another round of money-printing, and  finally green-light the long-awaited &#8220;Qe3,&#8221; or third round of  &#8220;Quantitative Easing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The QE programs involve the Fed printing hundreds of billions of  dollars and pumping them into the marketplace, where they ostensibly  stimulate the economy (although recent experience tells us that the  money mostly ends up being swallowed by the financial services industry \u2013  but that&#8217;s another subject for another time). Anyway, Bernanke declined  to go ahead with a third QE program in late 2011, but O&#8217;Neill  apparently thinks we&#8217;ll get it in 2012. From <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2010-11-16\/s-p-500-may-rise-20-on-u-s-growth-as-china-slows-goldman-s-o-neill-says.html\">Bloomberg<\/a>: <\/i><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;If QE2 doesn\u2019t work, then we\u2019ll get QE3,&#8221; said O\u2019Neill, who was  named chairman of the money manager in September after working as the  co-head of global economics research and chief currency economist at New  York-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/quote?ticker=GS:US\" title=\"Get Quote\">Goldman Sachs Group Inc.<\/a> since 1995. There\u2019s a &#8220;good chance&#8221; the S&amp;P 500 will rise 15 percent to 20 percent in the next 12 months, he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>O&#8217;Neill added that he thought a 20 percent bump would be &#8220;relatively straightforward&#8221; for the U.S. S&amp;P.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They pumped also pumped up the BRICS, and then shorted them, and <b>aggressively sold their customers European bank stocks<\/b> earlier this month.<\/p>\n<p>Goldman Sachs is really nothing more than a ferociously criminal enterprise. They earn commissioners by advising their customers, and then they cheat them.<sup>*<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>The only reason to do business with them is to capitalize on their exquisitely honed revolving-door government connections.<\/p>\n<p>If a prosecutor were to aggressively to pursue a RICO investigation against them, they would be toast, because the (to my mind dangerously low) standard of a, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act\">pattern of racketeering activity<\/a>,&#8221; is not a high bar to clear.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">Note to self.  I need to get libel insurance.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the Vampire Squid recommends a buy, sell as fast as you can: It seems Jim O&#8217;Neill, the head of Goldman&#8217;s Asset Management department, is predicting that the United States stock market may go up &#8220;15 to 20 percent.&#8221; O&#8217;Neill apparently believes Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve will resort to another round of money-printing, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1004],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184860"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}