Goldman Sachs Execs Should be Charged under RICO
Fat cats stole $100,000,000 every day from suckers like you and me
If that's not a racket, I don't know what is.
(First of all, I want to give props to this guy, who called this at least a week before the story broke. He needs to take the word "legally" out of the headline, though. There is nothing legal about what Goldman was/is doing.)
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who found it suspicious that Goldman Sachs came through the financial carnage unscathed. As it turns out, they made money while everyone else failed by cheating on a massive scale.
Almost everyone should have heard this story by now. But they probably haven't because they've been mesmerized by the rags-to-riches story of Michael Jackson. Let me summarize: Abusing a millisecond advantage that they have in the flow of information, Government Sachs has been front running the market for some period of time and making huge profits.
Front running is illegal, even if you are the most powerful financial company in the world. What this revelation (The revelation of Goldman's "secret sauce") means if true -- and unless a great number of financial observers are hallucinating, it is true -- is that Goldman has not earned one dime. They have stolen billions from the rest of us, honest investors who use business information (as opposed to the real-time trading information that Goldman has been abusing) to make our investment decisions.
Let me digress a bit and talk about the dangers of not prosecuting financial criminals to the full extent of the law. If we had sent all the S&L crooks on long stretches of hard time and confiscated their stolen wealth, I posit that we would not be having these problems today. Instead, we let them get away with it, and look where we are now, 20 years later. Let's not make that mistake again! (A lot of lessons should have been learned from S&L, including the foolishness of deregulation in the financial sector, but I have now officially digressed too far...)
The relevance of S&L is this: The GS cats are rich. They are connected. They probably think that, like most of the S&L grifters, they are safely insulated from legal action. I want to tell them right now that they are not. We will not make that mistake again! This time they've gone too far. They've pissed too many people off.
So listen up, all you unjustifiably rich Goldman Sucks criminals: The best that you swine can hope for is to have your stolen wealth seized, your reputations dragged through shit, and your bodies incarcerated for the rest of your natural lives. Your pedigree will not help you. It will hurt you.
If RICO does not apply here, justice is not only dead but long buried in this country. RICO -- it isn't just for Italians and non-Caucasians anymore!
If you're still not mad, read this.
- charliehiphop's blog
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Comments
#1 A simple explanation of how the "secret sauce" works
Goldman had access to information that mere mortal traders do not, namely the execution of trades in progress. They used it to their benefit like this:
Trader A announces (electronically) that he's looking to buy shares of Company X at $10 per share.
Trader B announces that he wants to sell shares of Company X at $10 per share.
Just before the trade happens, Goldman Sachs buys the shares from Trader B at $10 a share and announces to Trader A that the price is actually $10.01 per share. Trader A, none the wiser, shrugs and pays it, figuring he was just a little too slow. Wash and repeat millions of times per day on trades of huge volume, and you've got a recipe for huge profits.
It's also illegal -- it's called front running. It may also fall under insider trading, and with laws about cybercrimes being what they are, an argument could be made about that since it was all done with telecom/computer technology.
What this means is that Goldman Sucks was stealing from all the Trader Bs -- the Bear Stearnses, Citigroups, Merril Lynch, and Lehman Brothers of the world. That's why everybody else fell while Goldman stood tall through the crisis. The derivatives hurt, but paying a tax to Goldman on every trade certainly helped things along.
These bastards need to go down hard. All that money needs to be taken back and given to its rightful owners, pumped into the legitimate financial system so that it can flow through the economy again.