The significance of the former Treasury secretary’s contact with Goldman Sachs during the AIG bailout
The New York Times just “dumped a gigantic bucket of kerosene on the Goldman Sachs conspiracy fire,” said Joe Weisenthal in Clusterstock. The Times obtained records showing that then–Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was in steady contact with Goldman, his former firm, as the government was planning the AIG bailout last September. He got ethics waivers to talk to Goldman, but that shows he was “specifically” worried about Goldman’s survival.
I’ve certainly been “skeptical” of the Goldman “conspiracy theorists,” said Andrew Clark in Britain’s The Guardian. But 26 phone calls in one week between Paulson and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein? That’s “almost stalker-like behavior.” Paulson had no financial stake in helping Goldman, but since Goldman indirectly got $13 billion in the taxpayer bailout of AIG, it seems fair to question his loyalties.
Read more at: The Week
Related News:
- Hank Paulson In Constant Contact With Goldman During Crisis (GS)
- Paulson’s Calls to Goldman Tested Ethics
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{Photography by Kunta Tokyo}
AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.
This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?
Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?
To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing. (Read more at: NYTimes.com)
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{Photography by Marco 1985}
This quote, from Newsweek’s piece on former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, strikes me as a bombshell:
Paulson–by his own admission–was not paying much attention to the way banks were slicing and dicing mortgages and selling them as complex securities. “I didn’t understand the retail market; I just wasn’t close to it,” he told NEWSWEEK.
If Newsweek won’t play prosecutor, I will: “Hank Paulson, you were Goldman’s chief executive as mortgage securities boomed in 2004-5. Your earned an incredible severance, partly because of it. And you say you didn’t understand mortgage securities? How is that remotely possible?”
I’d like to offer a bit of analysis, but all I’ve got is bewilderment. The reason I find the revolving door between Wall St. and Washington somewhat acceptable is that I think it’s important that those who govern Wall Street understand it. But Paulson, by his own admission, didn’t really. Think about this: A guy whose $46 million compensation package was made possible by leaving during Goldman’s mortgage-security boom “was not paying much attention” to the mortgage-security boom! I don’t know if Paulson is fibbing, or if mortgage-securities were such a specialized and esoteric money machine that basically nobody understood what was going on, but either way, this seems devastating. (Read more at: the Atlantic)
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{Photography by Moose.Boy}
A patent is granted is someone invents something, something new that didn’t exists before. That’s the layman’s understanding of what a Patent is.
What about ‘stuff’ that is there, was already there, just . . . not found? Is that patentable? Could Christopher Columbus patent America? Sounds weird and funny, doesn’t it?
Genes, as in human genes, are the components of our DNA, which . . . have always been there, and companies are filing and obtaining patents on genes. If you a baffled on how the USPTO grants patents on genes, how that’s views from en ethic prospect, and how different organizations like ACLU views it, here’s a short list of interesting articles that might raise more questions than provide answers:
- How Human Genes Become Patented (CNN.com)
- Diamond v. Chakrabarty (Wikipedia)
- Human Genome Project (Wikipedia)
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{Photography: Genes by Red Cherry Hill}
When Genae Girard received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2006, she knew she would be facing medical challenges and high expenses. But she did not expect to run into patent problems.
Ms. Girard took a genetic test to see if her genes also put her at increased risk for ovarian cancer, which might require the removal of her ovaries. The test came back positive, so she wanted a second opinion from another test. But there can be no second opinion. A decision by the government more than 10 years ago allowed a single company, Myriad Genetics, to own the patent on two genes that are closely associated with increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and on the testing that measures that risk.
(More from the New York Times)
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{Photography by Tellumo}
