Financial reform is something we all agree upon, or do we? We all agree we need it, we just don’t know how we need it or agree on the fix. The Senate Republicans voted Monday night against moving forward with debate on the financial reform bill. I guess both sides of the aisle will have to go back to the drawing board. Too bad they can’t kick the lobbyists out.
Meanwhile. the Senate continues to grill Goldman Sachs executives over suspected wrongdoing on their part during the 2008 financial crisis. Some of the highlights may be seen below. The senators seemed to fixate on some verbage that boils down to ‘one sh!tty deal.’ Perhaps that really is the crux of the matter.
There don’t seem to be many heroes out there but the big zero is one executive director Fabrice Tourre, who is the subject of a fraud lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Fabrice nicknamed himself ‘fab Fab’. This ego driven maniac will not find U.S. Senators quite as taken by him as his girlfriends have been.
One of his emails to one of the 2 women he was dangling contained the following from the New York Daily News:
Six months later, Tourre joked about finding new suckers. “I have managed to sell a few Abacus bonds to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport,” he writes, adding, “Not feeling too guilty about this.”
In case you didn’t understand the Washington Post’s video from ABC News, I have included Jon Stewart’s take on these Senate Hearings. Jon Stewart made a lot more sense to me. He cut to the chase. The Timberwolf really does seem to be ‘one sh!tty deal.’ Then there is that real sleaze bag, the Fabulous Fab, making his fortune off the backs of widows and orphans. Stewart mourns the death of the elephonkey.
The GS people truly are playing with us. According to the Washington Post:
Goldman hired lawyers who formerly worked on the committee to prepare the executives; one of those lawyers once told a trade journal that the best strategy is “long, thoughtful pauses followed by rambling non-responsive answers.” The executives practiced the technique.
At one point, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked Tourre about an e-mail he wrote that suggested he was looking to sell mortgage-backed investments only to unsophisticated investors. But, taking his time, he asked her three times to identify which e-mail she meant and to repeat her question.
“I cannot help but get the feeling that a strategy of the witnesses is to try to burn through the time of each questioner,” Collins responded in an exasperated tone.
These people seem to think they are above the law and far above the rest of us. They sicken me. So many people lost so much; people who trusted banks and financial institutions to do the right thing. Were we all duped? How close to financial ruin were we all? We were on the precipice while these bastards played the system. It wasn’t just Goldman Sachs. Apparently the problem was ubiquitous.
