The author has been a managing director at Goldman Sachs and gives an insider view of the bailouts, bonuses and backroom deals from Washington to Wall Street. One chapter is headed 'Government Sachs' to underline the network of interaction between the U.S. top financiers and government agencies and elected officials. Criminal financiers were rescued by the public purse because of this interaction and Obama has a more integral relation to this network than Bush. He is now presiding over the largest transfer of public money to private pockets in U.S. history. There is no sense of responsibility to the public and no inclination to reform the financial system.
U.S. capitalism finds its ultimate achievement in the vicious competitiveness of its financial institutions which create clever and complex methods of making something out of nothing. Who gets the biggest bonuses is part of the competition. The most successful institution is Goldman Sachs whose personnel infiltrate and direct government. The author does not ascribe any planned conspiracy to this running of the country, but believes it to be a matter of backroom deals between extreme opportunists.
Nor does the author make any reference to the ethnic backgrounds of the top dogs. Although I have never read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although I simply accept the document is a fake, although I presume it is about controlling the world by controlling its finance, I now realise after reading this book that regardless of ethnicity the document may well speak truth. We now live in a world controlled by the financiers, making so-called democracy and political parties irrelevant. The author quotes Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the House of Rothschild: "Let me issue and control a nation's money, and I care not who writes the laws".
There is much useful information in this work: the similarity of cause for the Great Depression and this 'recession'; the value of the New Deal; the unacceptability of merging commercial and investment banks; the lack of responsible oversight from the Federal Reserve and from Congress. An example of some good and clear information: "The Second Great Bank Depression has spawned so many lies, it's hard to keep track of which is the biggest. Possibly the most irksome class of lies, usually spouted by Wall Street hacks and conservative pundits, is that we're all victims to a bunch of poor people who bought McMansions, or at least homes they had no business living in. If that was really what this crisis was all about, we could have solved it much more cheaply in a couple of days in late 2008, by simply providing borrowers with additional capital to reduce their loan principals. It would have cost about 3 per cent of what the entire bailout wound up costing, with comparatively similar risk.... There were approximately $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans outstanding in the United States by the end of 2007. By May 2009, there were foreclosure filings against approximately 5.1 million properties. If it was only the subprime market's fault, $1.4 trillion would have covered the entire problem, right? Yet the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC forked out more than $13 trillion to fix the 'housing correction', as Hank Paulson steadfastly referred to the Second Great Bank Depression as late as November 20, 2008, while he was treasury secretary. With that money, the government could have bought up every residential morgage in the country - there were about $11.9 trillion worth at the end of December 2008 - and still have had a trillion left over to buy homes for every single American who couldn't afford them, and pay their health care to boot. But there was much more to it than that: Wall Street was engaged in a very dangerous practice called leverage. Leverage is when you borrow a lot of money in order to place a big bet.... Leverage included, we're looking at a possible $140 trillion problem. That's right - $140 trillion!......but leverage would not have had a platform without the help of a wondrous financial feat called securitization......" etc.
The overall impression left with me is that after a century or so of mass education and non-participatory democracy all that we have produced in the name of progress is the most sophisticated and powerful criminal gang in the history of mankind.
Rating: Very good
