CFTC Orders Goldman Sachs to Pay $120 Million Penalty
for Attempted Manipulation of and False Reporting of
U.S. Dollar ISDAFIX Benchmark Swap Rates
[U]Excerpt from the press release[/U] —
“Goldman, through its traders, bid, offered, and executed transactions in interest rate swap spreads, U.S. Treasuries, and Eurodollar futures contracts in a manner deliberately designed—in timing, price, and other respects—to influence the published USD ISDAFIX in order to benefit the Bank in its derivatives positions, according to the Order. In addition, Goldman, through its employees making the Bank’s USD ISDAFIX submissions, also attempted to manipulate and made false reports concerning USD ISDAFIX by skewing the Bank’s submissions in order to benefit the Bank at the expense of its derivatives counterparties and clients.”
That fine is most likely dwarfed by the profits earned from the scam…
[I]…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…
…The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: 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…
In his final pitch to voters in the days before the election, Trump used the image of Blankfein in a TV ad to argue that insiders had ruined the lives of ordinary Americans to enrich themselves. Here is the narration you heard when Blankfein’s face came on screen:
[/I]
[I]“It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”
Lack of BP activity aside, that could be due to the fact that this is really an old story. Not, perhaps, for GS, but for the banks overall. This story goes back to 2012 and the LIBOR scandal. By comparison, the GS fine is chump change. UBS was tagged for $1.2bln in the US alone.
Welcome has a point - perhaps it’s the case that the retail sector/general public are influenced by all the glossy adverts and take the view that major players always play by the rules.
Institutions spend a lot of money on PR.
There are a few whistle blowers who have come out in recent times, very little publicity, one held a press conference at the EU parliament last month to tell his story, was only ever shared by youtube.
It seems to me that more and more big powerful banks are receiving such fines and are being caught on illegal activity. Too much scams, too much corruption and exploitation of the people who work there and their clients. And when such a scandal comes out, soon the details are concealed and then they proceed to manipulate the economy into their own direction. Who cares that there are huge fines, unfortunately these fines come out of the regular person’s pocket and no one cares for the consequences. It’s sad but it’s the ugly truth.
