Goldman Sachs Woos Gadaffi

Matt Taibbi has a searingly funny account on his Rolling Stone blog of how Goldman Sachs took Gadaffi to the cleaners with corrupt deals that immediately blew up. First they did a $1.5 billion deal that immediately lost 98% of its value. Then they came back with a deal for $3.7 billion but, knowing that Gadaffi may be more than a little mad about being burned on the previous deal, they threw in all kinds of "sweeteners" to corrupt the officials into signing the deal despite its being a bad, bad deal.

Here's how Taibbi depicts the Goldman Sachs style of "modern" investment banking:

This is classic modern investment banking. You pitch some kind of deal to a city, state, or country, and it may or may not be a good deal for the actual citizens/residents whose money is at stake. But you can make it objectively a great deal for the individual officials with the power to sign off on the deal by sending a big fat check either to the politician in question or to some local slimeball consulting firm of his or her choosing. Anyway, there is some reason why we journalists are not supposed to call things like Goldman's proposed “$50m payment” bribes, but I can’t remember what it is.

This is the bank that has placed almost all the high posts in the last dozen US presidencies with Goldman Sachs "personnel", i.e. criminals everywhere! No wonder the US is being run into the ground. The lunatics are running the asylum.

Read the whole post to get the full picture of the depth and breadth of corruption within Goldman Sachs.

Update 2011jun05: Here is a video of Taibbi talking about this story with Eliot Spitzer: