What? Jesus and Goldman?? Why now? Well, they decided to bring up the subject:
"The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest," Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district. "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all." (emphasis added)
Testify! (no, really)
The article actually wanders quite a bit with hyperbolic quotes, and in no way touched on the root of the problem detailed by Michael Lewis and Matt Taibbi. As far as informative articles go, I think Lewis spends a bit too much time on himself (the meat of his article doesn't start until p. 3) and Taibbi makes too much of one secret meeting (as if secret meetings of pure evil are SO unusual among this pack these days), but these are very forgiveable digressions in highly recommended reads if you're still trying to figure out how the mess resulted in the crisis. I might compile it all into a diary, but for today, let me illustrate a contrast in perception. From Bloomberg:
Chartres, the bishop of St. Paul’s, said he welcomed bankers to debate in church, even though Jesus had thrown money changers out of the temple in Jerusalem, according to the Bible. "The money changers were actually selling sacrifices," Chartres said in an Oct. 27 interview in St. Paul’s. "It is the idea that you can buy off God."
OK, got it. You can do whatever you want as a moneychanger, just as long as you don't try to sell God. So, this is okay (from Lewis):
"You have to understand this," [Steve Eisman] says. "This was the engine of doom." Then he draws a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a "particularly egregious" [collateralized debt obligation]. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA (emphasis added). (Diary author's note: This is a huge scandal by itself, beyond the scope of this diary, but research the internal coup of Moody's. The crisis would not have happened without it. FYI, a "AAA" rating says these CDOs, which went off like live grenades, were rated as reliable as US TREASURY BONDS.) These bonds could then be sold to investors —- pension funds, insurance companies —- who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities (emphasis added). "I cannot fucking believe this is allowed -— I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years," Eisman says.
A lot of people talk about Goldman Sachs "stealing", but the question, "stole from whom?" is tough to answer. This is actually a pesky right-wing rebuttal in its validity; it's hard to accuse a suspect of theft if you don't know who the victim is. After all, TARP was a loan (a rather expensive one at that), and AIG's CDS obligations were paid out after the crisis. Taxpayers were swindled, but it doesn't add up -- and arguably that could be blamed on the government, since Obama green-lighted the AIG takeover. Even the naked short selling of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers (covered by Taibbi) was a small part of the game, a rare case of investment bank cannibalism. There were a lot of people who got pushed into subprime loans when they qualified for better by corrupt mortgage brokers, but most were already poor and were given deferred loans, so they never had much equity to lose. There were victims everywhere, but like a galaxy that spins too fast to hold together, it just doesn't add up. It's incredible to believe, but these massive scandals were side gigs, "little" muggings and rapes the investment banks performed on their way to The Big Job. If you see rubble and bodies on the street, it's plenty horrible, but what you're really looking for is the collapsed building. Where's ground zero??
Well, now we know. The whole intent of the financial crisis was to sell crappy -- and in most instances, imaginary -- loans to pension funds, endowment funds, retirement funds and other low-risk investors who had relied on time-honored ratings agencies.. This happened worldwide. If you were associated with any low-risk managed fund anywhere on the planet, you were robbed by the investment banks. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars that anchored everything from Harvard University to state pension plans in the UK -- Goldman, Moody's and their ilk ran off with eggs from every well-tended nest on the planet. And if you were a mortgage holder or a taxpayer, they just mugged and mowed you down during the getaway joy ride. Because, you know, you don't matter.
But hey, they didn't try to sell you God, so it's OK with Republican Jesus.
Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer John Varley stood at the wooden lectern in St. Martin-in-the- Fields on London’s Trafalgar Square last night and told the packed pews of the church that "profit is not satanic."
The 53-year-old head of Britain’s second-biggest bank said banks are the "backbone" of the economy. Rewarding high-performing bankers with more pay doesn't conflict with Christian values, he said. . .
I guess it depends what they mean by "high-performing", but I'll get a second opinion on that:
[19.23] Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. [19.24] And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Thanks, J-man. I think we now know why.