Calculated Risk is reporting on CIT, an about-to-fail lending institution:

From WSJ Real Time Economics: CIT’s Customers Issue an Urgent Request

Thirty-two trade groups, in an unusual display of unity, pleaded in a letter on Friday night for the Obama administration to reverse its decision and extend aid to the beleaguered small-business lender CIT Group Inc …

From the letter:

Dear Secretary Geithner:

Unfortunately, yesterday on Democracy Now!…

MATT TAIBBI: Well, Stephen Friedman last year was the chairman of the New York Fed when Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding company status, which again made—when Goldman did that, when they changed their status, it made the New York Federal Reserve their primary supervisor, which meant that Stephen Friedman would have been regulating Goldman Sachs. The former head of Goldman Sachs would have been regulating Goldman Sachs. Friedman asked for a waiver to keep his shares in Goldman Sachs, even as he was regulating Goldman Sachs, and he actually got that waiver…

Right, from Geithner. That’s right. That’s right. It was from Geithner. But then he went out again, and he bought more shares in Goldman, even after he got that waiver, without permission, and he eventually had to step down from his role as chairman of the New York Fed. But what’s interesting about that is that the guy who is now the president of the New York Fed, Dudley, is another former Goldman Sachs banker. So it’s like, you know, you can’t get rid of these guys.

So something tells me CIT will fail because their doing so wont hurt GS – in fact, GS will be there to pick up the pieces, just like with Lehman and Bear…

Goldman Sachs announced Tuesday that it would set aside nearly $11.4 billion from its profits to pay bonuses. If Goldman continues to earn profits at the same level, its employees could each earn, on average, close to $770,000 this year, with senior executives and bankers being paid much more. The average compensation amount is close to what it was during the boom in 2007, when Goldman set a Wall Street pay record.

Goldman’s record profits come just one month after it repaid $10 billion of TARP money to the US Treasury, and in so doing, freed itself from restrictions on year-end bonuses. Last year the firm also received $13 billion as part of the bailout of the failed insurance giant AIG and $28 billion in low-interest loans.

So basically, after having fucked the American taxpayers, they’ve basically giving that money to their execs and employees for a ‘job well done.’

Maybe Geithner will come to the rescue of CIT, after all, he’s one of the few people in our government’s financial apparatus with power that isn’t a former Goldman exec…. there’s more, much more in the Democracy Now! article should you choose to click the link and learn. If you’ve read this far, I’ll leave you with one more thing from the DemNow article that should really get you spittin fuckin mad:

AMY GOODMAN: How much money did Goldman Sachs pay in taxes in 2008?

MATT TAIBBI: They paid $14 million in taxes last year, which is an effective tax rate of about one percent, which means that they paid in taxes about a third of what CEO Lloyd Blankfein actually made in compensation last year.

If that doesn’t piss you off, you’re either a fool or working for Goldman Sachs – or quite possibly both.

Tags: depression 2.0, no really we're really fucking fucked this time, total cockup, trouble in paradise, we're fucked, wild speculation

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 10:34.