Somebody is Getting Rich

Here is a posting by Barry Ritholtz on his blog The Big Picture. He's giving his opinion of how a financial firm can report big profits in the midst of a financial meltdown. Here's the key bit:

Karl Denninger notes that a nasty rumor is circulating about Goldman Sachs amongst observers of the Street. Allegedly, GS is about to report their second-best quarter in history, +$12 billion or so…

In this era of finacial disasters, credit crisis, and recession, how is that possible?

Easy. You — and your grandkids — are the ones who paid for it:

“The fact that they (like so many others) are being paid by the taxpayer through AIG’s “conduit” for losses that didn’t (yet) happen at 100 cents on the dollar might be the basic math.

And further (and potentially much worse) there is the repeated statement by Goldman executives that they were “fully hedged” against a potential counterparty default by AIG. One wonders - was that “hedge” to be short the equity on AIG itself, perhaps?

Why is this important?

Because if that’s how Goldman hedged they got paid twice and the taxpayer literally got robbed. Someone in Congress needs to look into this now; there are already rumblings of investigation. Those rumblings need to get a lot louder and turn into subpoenas, not “polite inquiries.”

...

This is theft on the sort of grand scale thta calls for the population to revolt. Perhaps the French peasants were right; Time to bring the guillotine for executing nobles and bankers. . .