Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:58:14 +0000 – So Chris Dodd is the mastermind behind "Government Sachs."The Democratic Senator from Connecticut will be remembered, in reality, as "the Senator from Wall Street." There are others, of course, but Dodd deserves his own special place in the pantheon.
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Did you wonder where the Federal Reserve found that multi-trillion giant rabbit it pulled out of its hat to loan each of the big investment banks billions of dollars so they could continue to earn fat profits on their swollen inventories of bonds while everyone else suffered from a "liquidity crisis"? Saturday's Washington Post has an article explaining how it all goes back to a single sentence in a 1991 law. Now for the fun part -- it has the fingerprints of our old friends at the "shadow Treasury Department" all over it.
To quote the relevant passage:
"The 1991 legislation, authored by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), was requested by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms in the wake of the 1987 market crisis, and it would save some of them a generation later."
When the epitaph of American capitalism is finally carved on its tombstone and it is laid to rest, I'm sure some Goldman partners will be there to toss the last shovel of dirt on the casket. What a fantastic business model they have engineered over the years -- bending the government to their will at every turn and never sharing a cent of the profits. Kind of reminds me of that other great bastion of capitalism, Archer Daniels Midland, except that the company's former CEO went to prisonfor getting the government to do his bidding.
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