From Forbes magazine:
Here’s the most basic analogy of guilt: Picture Goldman [Sachs] as a used car salesman. When it learned it had an inventory of lemons, rather than return those lemons to the manufacturers (lemon law in most states), it put those cars on promotion with very aggressive sales tactics.
Before the unsuspecting and trusting customer bought the lemon and drove off with it, Goldman purchased “protection” — life and auto insurance policies on the driver that were set to profit when the lemon crashed and burned.
Sound familiar?
It should. And if it doesn’t, then it will.
Because Goldman Sachs is about to fingercuff humanity all over again.
The new “lemon” is carbon derivatives. And the “protection” – which Goldman has also invented – is ‘Death Derivatives’:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), which bundled and sold billions of dollars of mortgage loans, now want to help investors bet on people’s deaths.
Pension funds sitting on more than $23 trillion of assets are buying insurance against the risk their members live longer than expected. Banks are looking to earn fees from packaging that risk into bonds and other securities to sell to investors.
Like any successful serial killer, Goldman has found a successful MO (method of operation). And simply refines and repeats it, over and over again.
Goldman Sachs crashed the global markets in 2008’s Global Financial Crisis, and made out like a bandit through the entire process. How? By creating toxic mortgage-backed securities (derivatives) and on-selling them to the world. That’s the front end of the ‘cuff.
On the rear end, Goldman knew its “lemon” mortgage-backed derivatives would explode, and set itself up to profit massively when it did. That’s ‘cuff #2:
Goldman should be tarred and feathered over the 2008 meltdown. Like others on Wall Street, Goldman had an active mortgage department designing, packaging, securitizing, promoting, and selling mortgage-backed securities and related synthetic derivatives. Goldman’s trading desk conceived, promoted, and sold various protection strategies as market maker, agent, and principal.
As the housing bubble got close to bursting, Goldman became enlightened sooner than other banks, partially from witnessing the “big short” strategies of its infamous hedge-fund client John Paulson.
The entire firm came around to believing the great mortgage bubble was a house of cards ready to collapse, based on delinquencies, no-doc loans, fraud, and more...
Goldman had two choices: discontinue the sale of junk-mortgage securities and alerting the government, media, public, their clients, and investors; or, keep it a secret, sell off junk-mortgage securities to investors, profit from the inevitable bursting of the bubble, and steal and even front-run part of Paulson’s trade.
Clearly, Goldman’s short (protection) trade was connected to clearing out their long trades (selling the lemons)…
Once Goldman had its “big short” trades on, it couldn’t wait for the payday, risking the market might recover. It knew marking down its own long portfolio of lemons could trigger the crisis and the huge short-trade payouts. Marking down the lemons lowered them for sale to investors and forced all other banks to do almost the same. Based on fair-value accounting rules, Goldman forced lower fire-sale marks on the industry which put some financial institutions out of business almost overnight. Which turned into another win, as Goldman had pre-purchased credit-default swaps to pay off on their competitors’ demise.
Having raped the USA (and much of the Western world) with their mortgage-backed derivatives bubble, Goldman has refined its MO, and now it has its sights set on the next target. The entire human race.
Fingercuff #1 is carbon trading. That’s the “lemon” being aggressively sold to the world, by Goldman’s handpicked used car salesmen like Malcolm Turnbull.
You know the sales pitch. “Pricing carbon” through carbon taxes / trading is “necessary”, to “save the planet”.
But carbon taxes/derivatives trading is a “lemon”, and it’s designed to do one thing. Kill you … slowly. Through ever-rising costs for everything. To warm your house. To buy food. Goldman gets richer, while you get poorer.
Fingercuff #2 is ‘death derivatives’. That’s the “protection” end.
But it’s no protection for you.
“Death derivatives” is a new form of “protection” sold by Goldman’s to superannuation funds, life insurance companies, “investors”, and speculators. Anyone who stands to gain, or lose, depending on when you die.
What most won’t notice – again – is that there’s a big hole in their “protection”.
And the hole is the serial killer who’s selling it:
The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain…
The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: 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. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
Did you lose money – in your super fund, say – thanks to the Goldman-inspired GFC?
With the Carbon Tax, we’re about to get raped again.
But this time, it’s not just a question of money.
It really is a question of life and (premature) death.
Barnaby Is Right 
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