The New York Times is reporting that Goldman Sachs has decided it doesn’t want the TARP bailout money after all and is going to return it.
You know what? It’s not going to matter. They should get used to the way things are right now with the federal government looking over their shoulder and pretty much the whole country breathing down their necks.
Goldman Sachs is planning to give back its TARP money soon. Very soon, actually — ideally within the next month, according to people involved in the process. That’s a much quicker timetable than the end-of-year goal previously set out by Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chief executive.
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“It’s just impossible to run our business in this environment,” said one senior Goldman executive who insisted on not being quoted by name for fear of crossing the Treasury Department.
Here’s my advice to Goldman Sachs: Get used to “this environment”. Unless I miss my guess, our very astute and oh-so-clever new President is going to capitalize on the populist outrage that these financial wunder-idiots have created and use it as an engine to spur putting in place the regulatory measures that should have been in place years ago. Just like Ronald Reagan literally ripped the solar panels off the White House, over the years he and others stripped our society of the checks and balances that kept us out of national financial ruin for 50 years. And now those chickens have come home to
As smart as President Obama and his team are, I would not put it past them to have allowed the “retention bonuses” that AIG paid out a couple of weeks ago to play out without them interfering in any way. They had to know that it would raise a hue and cry among Americans unlike anyone has seen since the World Trade Center was knocked down by terrorists. It’s hard to come up with anything – ANYTHING – that has so completely united liberals, conservatives and independents in mutual outrage. Honestly, trial lawyers have to be breathing a sigh of relief that they are no longer the country’s whipping boy.
The Obama administration had know that this would happen. And, astutely, they had to know that it would provide them a golden opportunity to put through banking and other financial sector regulation with very little opposition. After the in-your-face chutzpah of CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, AIG and all the others, the rails are greased for easy passage of pretty much any sensible regulations they want to put through.
Get ready, boys and girls in the financial world, you’re about to have your wings clipped.
It’s about damn time.
I’m just sayin’…
