FT Alphaville » Goldman accused of hindering crisis probe.
The continuing contempt of banks for regulation becomes clearer by the day. as the FT notes:
The US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission accused Goldman Sachs on Monday of an “abysmal” response to requests for information and said it had issued a subpoena to compel the bank to provide documents and executives for interviews, reports the FT. The commission said Goldman had failed to answer some questions while providing an indigestible 5 terabytes of data — equivalent, to 2.5bn pages — in response to others.
The Guardian noted:
The chairman of the US body probing the causes of the financial crisis accused Goldman of "mischief-making" by delivering billions of pages of impenetrable information instead of the answers requested about its involvement in toxic derivatives, securities and market-making.
"We did not ask them to pull up a dumper truck to our office and dump a bunch of rubbish," said Phil Angelides, a California Democrat who chairs the commission. "We asked them for very specific documents."
Angelides said Goldman had provided five terabytes of information — roughly equivalent to 2.5bn pages of documents — but the content was offered "in a manner clearly not designed to allow us to determine the information we required".
He added: "This is not a misunderstanding. This has been a very deliberate effort over time to run up the clock."
The answer is available to Congress: block all government contracts for Goldman.
Ultimately threaten to remove its banking licence.
They can be told who is boss.
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“They can be told who is boss.”???
We know who is boss. Those holding the sovereign power to issue money are in charge. In case anyone didn’t notice, the banks control the politicians, and told them to pass the astonishing TARP legislation.
And this is why taxing the banks makes no sense. Holding the sovereign power, the banks are basically paying themselves. The only sensible solution is the restoration of sovereign powers to the government – the power to spend money into circulation and tax it out again.
Yes, Adrian, this is the best kept (from the masses) secret. I myself didn’t realise that banks create money out of thin air. Because, of course, it is credit and not physical money which is the effective medium. It is completely incomprehensible why govts don’t take control and benefit from the seignorage. We need a campaign ….