Held by the throat

Goldman Sachs announced record quarterly profits: $3 billion. But these are not normal times. Any profits made by financial institutions deserve a careful analysis.

When the current crisis started banks were sitting on a huge pile of toxic instruments, notionally worth quadrillions of dollars. This is a massive pile of toxic waste worth on the market nothing but having a massive face value.

Then the US government, and and other governments too, pumped in billions, trillions of dollars of liquidity into the system. It should be examined then whether Goldman Sachs found a way of converting some of this massive pile of toxic waste that would be normally worthless (that must have been written off as such last autumn), to convert into government injected cash. And whether they will continue doing that posting big profits in months to come whilst ordinary business and consumers market will see very little liquidity that governments (stupidly) expected when they injected liquidity into the system.

If that was the case that would have confirmed a well predicted (last autumn) scenario: effectively banks, with the help of governments, developed a control method of the economy (and hence taxpayers) that work in the same way, as loan sharks control their "customers" (or rather victims). No matter how much the victims pay, their debt keeps on growing and the sharks are able to extract every dime earned by their victims. In essence, the financial "elite" holds the taxpayers by their throats.

It may (or may not) be coincidental that in this scenario that Goldman Sachs is so close to the US government. British government also pumped billions into the banking system. It will not be surprising, or it may be to some, if JP Morgan, that is very close to the British government, posts large profits too.