Capitalism has not taken a hit like this since Mr. Potter made his appearance as the evil banker in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” No leftist polemicist could come up with as damning a description of contemporary capitalism as the contents of an e-mail that Goldman’s Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre sent to his girlfriend.
“Well,” he wrote, “what if we created a ‘thing,’ which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”
Perhaps Fab once read the Karl Marx who wrote: “The more abstract money is, the less natural its relationship to other commodities.”
Marx also called such financial instruments “fictitious capital” which is “money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity.”
The lesson is that the surest way to save capitalism is to regulate it in the public interest. The surest way to create socialists is for everyone to experience the economic consequences of counting only on the goodness in the hearts of Mr. Potter and Fabrice Tourre.
New York Post: Goldman may settle fast with SEC. The vampire squid may be ready to settle after their disastrous showing in the Senate hearing. If so, this would be a very fast settlement indeed. But hey, I don’t want some slap on the wrist fine that does not personally affect the slime in their corporate suites. Let’s have criminal indictments. Perp walks. Make ’em be scared to walk down the street. Oh wait, that’s already happening.
Goldman tells its employees to avoid inappropriate parties, restaurants, and talking shop in public
Goldman might settle with a hedge fund that lost money on the “shitty deal.” Goodness, how very un-predator like. The Big Bad Vampire Squid appears to be losing its huff-and-puff. Scratch a bully, find a coward?
But remember, the failure of the company is not the failure of the control fraud. Those at the top profited mightily from all this.