Thursday 3 June 2010

Where there's smoke, there's Goldman Sachs with a box of matches

From Raw Story:

"The brokerage firm that's faced the most scrutiny from regulators in the past year over the shorting of mortgage related securities seems to have had good timing when it came to something else: the stock of British oil giant BP.

According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman's sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP's stock during the quarter.

If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value, or $96 million."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw this in the news and I don't understand. Isn't the implication here that someone knew about this spill in advance? How's that work??

Trooper Thompson said...

The implication would be that this was not an accident, but a deliberate act.

As such, it's pure speculation at this point, but worthy of raising an eyebrow to, at least.

Anonymous said...

Right, then; a deliberate act. And what would they gain from this?

Trooper Thompson said...

I'm not saying that it was deliberate, I've seen no such evidence, but certain interests will gain, or attempt to gain by exploiting it - to paraphrase Rahm Emmanuel; 'never let a crisis go to waste'.

This disaster will, one way or another, be used as a vehicle to push through the existing agenda with regard to energy, which heralds massive increases in taxes, corporatist cartels in energy production and carbon trading, limits on new drilling, thus protecting the major interests from competition etc.

The 'climate change' agenda stalled at Copenhagen, and this could be the very thing to jump-start it.

So, what is to gain? Money and power. Like I said, I don't know if this is the case, but I flagged it up because this is Goldman Sachs, and in the case of the financial meltdown over sub-prime mortgages, in the AIG business and most recently the Greek economic crisis Goldman Sachs are deeply involved, so that's the context.

Check out Matt Taibbi's renowned Rolling Stone article on GS, which may shed light on my views:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64796

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates."

Anonymous said...

Oh, I agree that it's dodgy... I guess my brain just can't get round the idea of destroying so much for so little in comparison. To me, at least.

Trooper Thompson said...

What is being destroyed does not directly concern those that will gain so much.

But we shouldn't get carried away with conspiracies that are unproven, the scandal is bad enough, such as the use of the chemical dispersal agent that is incredibly toxic.