Another major corporate backer of same sex marriage has emerged.  Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs has come out strongly in favor of marriage equality.

In a new video for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) advocacy group Blankfein urges  “majority of Americans who support marriage equality. America’s corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and it’s the right thing to do,

Blankfein’s support is nothing new.  He wrote an open letter to the New York Assembly in support of Gay Marriage when the issue was before the State Legislature last year.  What is interesting to note is what Reuters had to say on the subject saying,

“a rare public display of support on a highly controversial issue from one of the financial world’s titans whose firm has not always endeared itself among supporters of liberal causes, depicted by some lawmakers and activists as the epitome of Wall Street greed.”

HRC says this is exactly why this video is so important.  Because it shows a person who is not very progressive on most issues and is not very well liked on the Left, it show’s just how far across the political divide this issue reaches.

HRC executive Fred Sainz said to the New York Times,

“Lloyd Blankfein is not someone average Americans would think is going to support marriage equality,” he said. “The green visor crowd is not typically associated with socially progressive policies, and this is further proof that a diversity of Americans are coming to the same conclusion.”

Here is the HRC video staring Lloyd Blankfein

Goldman Sachs CEO Supports Gay Marriage [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Government lawyers announced a settlement has been reached with the 5 largest mortgage lenders in the country.  The settlement came in response to the banks deceptive practices relating to foreclosures. A draft of the settlement s with the parties for review.

The deal is unlikely to really benefit those who lost their homes over the last few years,  they will not be able to return to their houses.  They may be eligible for up to $1,800 in reimbursement for their troubles.  The settlement is said to be for around $25 billion dollars, second only to the settlement between the States and Big Tobacco.

The major benefit to the agreement is that those who are in trouble with their mortgages may find it much easier to restructure their payments allowing them to stay in their homes.

Five major banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Financial in addition to the States Attorneys general could adopt the deal within weeks.

Nearly 8 million Americans have faced foreclosure since the housing bubble burst. In some cases, companies that process mortgages failed to verify the information on foreclosure documents. The worst practices, known collectively as “robo-signing,” included employees signing documents they hadn’t read or using fake signatures to sign off on foreclosures.

Sources say President Barack Obama is going to talk about the settlement in the State of the Union address. There are some who are not happy with the deal because they say no one is being held responsible for the illegal actions of some of the banks.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, who was less than thrilled with the settlement said in a statement,

“Wall Street again is trying to pass the buck. Instead of criminal prosecutions, we’re talking about something that’s not more than a slap on the wrist.”

As part of the deal about a million homeowners will be able to restructure loans where they owe more than the house is worth. Up until now these people had very little hope of being able to refinance.

The deal allegedly is made up of the following points,

– $17 billion would help struggling homeowners reduce the principal of their loans.

– $5 billion would be placed in State escrow to pay $1,800 to those who lost their home due to the banks deceptive practices

– About $3 billion would to help homeowners refinance at 5.25 percent.

Do you think the banks are getting off easy with this settlement?

5 Largest Mortgage Lenders Reach Settlement With States is a post from: The Inquisitr

It wasn’t a good quarter to be a trader or investor at financial firm Goldman Sachs after the company posted a $428 million loss on Wednesday, equivalent to 84 centers per share.

Analysts had expected the company to post a 16 cent per share loss however the company recorded a loss of $2.48 billion in its Investment & Lending division, the sector of the company that controls stocks, bonds and other long-term holdings.

The loss includes $1.05 billion from Goldman’s private equity investment for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Speaking about the losses CEO Lloyd Blankfein said:

“Our results were significantly impacted by the environment, and we were disappointed to record a loss.”

The quarterly loss is only the second time in Goldman Sachs history that the company reported negative results. The last negative reporting quarter came in Q4 2008 as the economy spun out of control and Lehman Brothers disappeared into the night.

Compared to the same time last year the company’s revenues were down 60% while they also fell 51% from Q2 2011.

According to the financial statement the companies urrency and commodities client trading business, once a key profit creator for the company reported just $1.73 billion in revenue, down by 36 percent from one year earlier.

Are you surprised to learn that Goldmach Sachs has fallen so fast, so quickly?

Goldman Sachs Reveals $428 Million Loss In Q3 2011 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Did you catch Too Big to Fail last weekend on HBO?

For a financial drama, it was riveting to watch, but it also painted a grim picture of the sway held by fallible entities like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Two of the firms, for instance, who may have helped drive gas prices for this summer way up by predicting the circumstance of high crude oil prices last week.

Above any other factor, oil market speculation is the one most responsible for what you pay per gallon at the pump each time you fill up your tank. Prices dropped to a recession record low in late 2008, but have since essentially doubled, sending ripples of unease through every other market. USA Today has an interesting look into the factors behind the painfully high prices, and a close-up look at what factors drive gas prices into the wallet-obliterating stratosphere.

Commenting on the effects of last week’s statement by Goldman and Merrill Lynch, Mark Keck of Keck Energy said:

“There won’t be another drop in the price of gasoline this weekend, and it’s due to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley… What a crazy system we have,” he said. “People resist paying an extra 5 cents per gallon in gas tax to fix the highways, but we allow speculators to raise the price of gasoline by 50 cents a gallon.”

Former oil trader Stephen Schork writes a commodities trading newsletter, and he adds:

“The best way to predict the market is to create it.

“Goldman was giving a signal that the dumb money could come back into the oil market, and it worked,” Schork said.

The cries echo those made nearly two years ago by Matt Taibbi, an investigative journalist for Rolling Stone and vociferous critic of the financial industry. Taibbi spins a believable tale of horror about how Goldman continually plays the American public in an everlasting shell game called “speculation,” and sagely predicts energy futures would be the next great scam perpetrated by the “giant vampire squid relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

A buzz has started in Washington about the effects of speculation on the oil market, but chances are we won’t see change in policy surrounding gas prices for a while yet. Do you feel the effects of skyrocketing gas prices in your daily life? Where has it affected you?

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Want to Know Why Gas Prices Will Be Astronomical This Summer? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) gave every reporter and blogger an excuse to use four-letter words in headlines today when he confronted Goldman Sachs executives with emails focused on pushing what they admitted at the time was a “shitty deal.”

The deal referred to by Sen. Levin related to a fund called Timberwolf, which  plummeted in value 80% within months of being issued. Although internal emails correctly identify the fund as “shitty,” Goldman Sachs execs told sales personnel that sales of the fund were a “top priority.” Timberwolf was what is known as a ”collateralized debt obligation” (CDO)- an investment rooted “not on actual home mortgage bonds but instead on those bonds’ movements.”

In the clip below, Sen. Levin grills former Goldman mortgage head Daniel Sparks on his admission that Timberwolf was shitty and that Goldman intentionally lead investors to purchase the “shitty” investment. Which, we should add, is pretty shitty in and of itself. Levin says:

“You knew it was a shitty deal and that’s what your e-mails show. How much of this shitty deal did you continue to sell to your clients?”

As you can see in the video, Sparks attempts continually to dodge the question and is reticent to repeat the term back to Levin.

Video: Sen. Levin berates Goldman execs for ‘shitty deal’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

In what can almost be described as an “Economic Meltdown For Dummies,” Matt Taibbi’s article “The Great American Bubble Machine” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone is a great primer on the machinations behind the current financial crisis that reads like a good novel.

You may remember Taibbi’s recent, almost viral ranty response to AIG bigwig Jay DeSantis’ New York Times letter of resignation. Taibbi got internet-wide props for the scathing piece, which gave voice to the lack of sympathy and palpable rage felt by many Americans when reading DeSantis’ sob story. An excerpt:

DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-F***ing-Hoo. You dog.

Taibbi is now making waves with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” crafting an argument that Goldman Sachs “has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression” and that they’re already planning their next heist. Taibbi breaks it down into five major bubbles, five huge market manipulations preying on the American public, hedging wild bets against our futures and better interests.

According to Taibbi, here’s the scam template:

Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased.

And the heartwarming history behind Goldman’s first major con during the Great Depression:

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment-trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund – which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah – which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

Getting deja vu yet? The next round of looting, according to the piece, didn’t occur until the dot-com bubble of the late 90s. Wild speculation and IPOs of never-profitable net properties were small potatoes compared to what came next.

Bubbles #3 & #4 were the housing bubble and gas-price gouging . As Jon Stewart famously skewered at Jim Cramer, Goldman Sachs and their ilk hedged their bets against us again in banking on their own shady mortgages defaulting and cashing in on the fallout. Speculation on the oil market soon after lead to gas costing upwards of $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008, but most Americans were too busy freaking out about their impending homelessness to notice the connection.

Bubble #5 was looting the bailout, but according to Taibbi, the next bubble will be even bigger- energy futures and carbon credits, and “groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an ‘environmental plan,’ called cap-and-trade.” Taibbi caps it off with a kind of acceptance- the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” will keep on sucking- but at least now we know about it.

Matt Taibbi on the Great American Bubble Machine is a post from: The Inquisitr