The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone
And here’s the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?
Fourteen million dollars.
That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent.
I finally finished reading this 7-page article by Matt Taibbi (one of my favorite writers ever) and I’m a strange mixture of pissed off and completely apathetic. Matt lays out lots of backstory about the investment bank Goldman Sachs and their questionable relationship to our government over the last two decades. I’m pissed because it seems like no matter what happens, they find a way to come out on top and pass the bill off to consumers and/or taxpayers. Yet I’m apathetic because these people might as well be in another galaxy, pulling the strings of the economy from so far away it’s pointless to even think about. Is self-interest really the only motivating force? Is there still no social responsibility in the financial industry?
