Predator Profile: GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP

GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP

Goldman Sachs, once lionized as the premier “money machine” of Wall Street has in the past few years become synonymous with greed and duplicity. A firm that long prided itself on putting the interests of its clients first was revealed to have repeatedly sold securities that it fully expected to plunge in value. Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi’s depiction of Goldman as “a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” has proved to be one of the most accurate and punishing criticisms of Goldman Sachs.

“Every country suspended the gold standard at the outbreak of the war [WWI]… This removed the automatic limitation on the supply of paper money. Then each country proceeded to pay for the war by borrowing from the banks. The banks created the money which they then lent by merely giving the Government a deposit of any size against which the Government could draw checks. The banks were no longer limited in the amount of credit they could create because they no longer had to pay out gold for checks on demand. Thus the creation of money in the form of credit by the banks was limited only by the demands of its borrowers.”

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book “Tragedy and Hope”