Who Fears to Speak of Goldman Sachs?

national | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis

Tuesday November 02, 2010 14:25

by Marcus McSpartacus

Who Trembles at the Name? The Entire Irish Media and Political Class, Apparently - With Honourable Exeptions?

Peter Sutherland has thrown his considerable weight behind the bank bailouts, and has told us we need to tighten our belts to do it. This is the same Peter Sutherland who helped bail out Garret Fitzgerald while a director of Allied Irish Banks. This is the Garret Fitzgerald who has told us we need to be patriots by not disagreeing with the bank bailouts. That was Allied Irish Banks, the profit-privatising institution which is now socialising its losses on us. This is Peter Sutherland, Chairman of Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest bondholders of Allied Irish Banks' debt, and thus one of the biggest potential beneficiaries of the bank bailouts.

Hello? Is anyone reading this? Anyone in the media? The Dáil? Anyone?

The only TD who seems to be raising this is Martin Ferris - please let us know in the comments section if you know of any others, or indeed of ANY coverage of this in the newspapers, radio, etc.

The only media coverage seems to be that of social media - Guido Fawkes, Politics.ie and of course Indymedia.ie being the honourable exceptions. But what is the excuse for everyone else?

Listed below are some links and clips. Feel free to forward this story to your local media outlet, with a question as to why it is not being covered.

==========

http://www.sinnfein.ie/contents/19429?utm_source=feedbu...in%29
Ferris: Government is being advised by the bond holders
Sinn Féin: October 28, 2010

The Sinn Féin Spokesperson on Workers Rights, Martin Ferris TD has claimed that the Government’s austerity programme is not only designed to pay for failed bondholders and speculators but is being advised by them. He referred to the fact that the Chairperson of Goldman Sachs Peter Sutherland whose Asset Management section holds Anglo Bonds has been advising the Government on the cuts [...]

“Take Peter Sutherland for example. He has held various high positions in this state and on behalf of this state abroad. His views are still given a lot of credence and he was recently widely quoted in claiming that this state had an obligation to protect the Anglo Irish bondholders.

“And of course he has been advising, in a totally disinterested way of course, the Government on how they should deal with the crisis. Among his proposals has been to sell state companies. And no doubt he probably knows chaps who might be interested in buying them at a fair price.

“How many of those who referred favourably to Sir Peter’s excellent advice also referred to his own possible self interest and the interest of his friends in all of this? He is, after all, Chairperson of Goldman Sachs whose Asset Management section is a key Anglo bondholder and which incidentally made profits of more than €13 billion last year.

“If our priority is to look after people like this, then the description given on one web site of Ireland as, ‘an international welfare state for super-rich bankers’ is all too accurate.”

----------

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/are-irish-taxpayers-ab...e-vam
Is Peter Sutherland Stealing From His Own People To Give To The Vampire Squid?
From Zero Hedge

With the recent nationalization of half of the country's six big banks, and the blanket guarantee over the rest of them, the Irish government has effectively made sure that bondholders in all banks, even those which such as long insolvent Anglo Irish bank will be made whole by the long-suffering Irish taxpayers...
Yet what is amusing is that in between the cracks of exclusively European-bank based senior and subordinated bondholders in such bankrupt banks as Anglo-Irish, a familiar name emerges: Goldman Sachs...
Guido Fawkes, who managed to obtain the Anglo Irish bondholder list, shares the following commentary:

Anglo-Irish Bank did not represent a systemic risk to the Irish economy, it wasn’t a high street bank like AIB or the Bank of Ireland. If it had been allowed to go the way of Lehmans the only losers would have been shareholders and bondholders. The Irish state stepped in and nationalised a bank that was basically run by crooks lending to property speculators. The Irish people are taking losses that should rightly have been shouldered by bondholders.

Every child in Ireland is being bequeathed a huge debt at birth to protect the interests of foreign, mainly German, bondholders – why? Guido was once a bond trader, it was always understood that sometimes the bond issuer defaults. That is the risk investors take.

So why is Dublin’s political establishment so keen to protect foreign investors at the expense of future generations? Guido has obtained the list of foreign Anglo-Irish bondholders as at the close of business tonight. These are the people whom Dublin’s politicians really seem to care about.

Between them they hold Anglo-Irish bonds with a face-value of €4,034,756,880. Shouldn’t they take the hit rather than future generations of Irish taxpayers? Capitalism is a system of profit and loss, they took the risk of investing in Anglo-Irish Bank. Is the Irish government under pressure from the European Central Bank in Frankfurt to protect German investors?

...we would like to add Goldman Sachs to the list of bailoutees. Surely, few firms in the world deserve to be redeemed as much as god's little helpers...

Little else that can be added here... except for this amusing anecdote of another Goldman Sachs International Chairman, one Peter Sutherland, former Ireland attorney general and EU commissioner who just so happens was a chairman of British Petroleum (remember those guys?) previously. To wit from the Irish Times:

[Sutherland] and [recently heckled] Lenihan have remained in contact through the financial crisis. On one occasion, Sutherland visited Lenihan to tell him what a great job he thought he was doing and to say that Lenihan had the potential to be one of the great taoisigh of the 21st century. Lenihan was taken aback, he says.

Surely, this great son of Ireland, who obviously has Lenihan in his back pocket, is in active negotiation on behalf of his current employer, Goldman Sachs. Yet something tells us Mr. Sutherland will be the last person to share light on Goldman's twilight relationship vis-a-vis the Irish government...

Lack of revisionism is not too surprising coming from a person whose personal, and future, fortune, is based on the past generosity of American, and now Irish taxpayers. Because his wealth is certainly not due to his skill at anything related to his actual career:

Sutherland was also a board member at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) during the financial meltdown when the UK bank collapsed into state arms after a frenetic, debt-fuelled growth. Of the bank’s 2007 role in the €71 billion acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro, the biggest ever banking takeover, Sutherland says it made “the mistake of buying at precisely the wrong time when the world was falling off the back of a bus”.

Perhaps instead of driving trucks full of cement into Parliament, Irish taxpayers can be a little more proactive, and ask one of their most respected "leaders" just on whose behalf he is working on in this latest bailout, which could easily be Ireland's last.

----------

More Goldman Sachs shennanigans in the US financial crisis (the original "vampire squid" by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone) at:

Taibbi’s Takedown of ‘Vampire Squid’ Goldman Sachs
Rolling Stone Magazine

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they're about to do it again
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.

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

----------

An Angry Ireland Calls Out Europe On Its B...s... Stress Test
ZeroHedge
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/angry-ireland-calls-ou...-test

Remember when the pathetic farce that was the stress test presumably prevented Europe's collapse, and served as the inflection point preventing the EUR from hitting parity with the USD? Well, one of the banks that the "stress test" uncovered to be solvent was the recently insolvent Allied Irish Bank, which earlier this month needed a taxpayer injection of billions to presumably make sure that European creditors (and likely Goldman Sachs, very much like the case in Anglo Irish) never see even one dime lost. And today, an Irish Member of the European Parliament Alan Kelly said he intends to write to the EU Competition Commissioner to discover just how it is that one of Ireland's top banks slipped through the stress test cracks only to require a bail out mere months later. It appears that slowly everyone in Europe is starting to turn against the trillions in German bank liabilities that stand to be impaired, and lead to a systemic collapse, unless local taxpayers dutifully reach into their back pocket and make sure fat bankers continue their worry-free existence.

From BreakingNews.ie:

A Labour MEP is to write to the EU Competition Commissioner to find out why the Commission gave Allied Irish Bank the all clear in July only for the bank to require billions earlier this month.

Alan Kelly has said Europe's failure to anticipate the development is very worrying.

Mr Kelly said: "The fact that AIB passed the stress test raises many questions."

We can't wait for the response from those uber pathological liars at the head of the ECB.