The thing you got to love about my friends on Wall Street is balls. I’m talking gold-plated basketball sized balls. Every one of those guys was bankrupt, jobless and looking at handcuffs when the house of cards tumbled down in 2008 and yet here they are back on top and thumbing their nose at everyone else.
Let’s look at AIG. Why on earth was the taxpayer buying an insurance company? Balls!
Companies like Goldman created all these bad financial products. They knew they were going to explode. So they wanted a way to bet against their own products and profit from the explosion. Who is gonna be the bookie to take those bets? AIG.
But those guys at AIG took out almost all the money they got paid in bonuses. So, when the shit hit the fan, the bookie was broke.
In stepped Hank Paulson. Thank God for Hank Paulson, the Bush Treasury Secretary, and more importantly, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He said the government had to take over AIG and make good on those bets. Balls!… And the taxpayers did … throwing more than a hundred billion dollars into making good on those bets and making good on those bonuses.
The feds took over AIG and paid everybody 100% on the bets they had made against their own financial products. And Hank Paulson is not paying off twenty or thirty percent on the dollar like the guys who placed their bets with Lehman, no he’s paying off his Goldman buddies 100 cents on the dollar. Balls! And Hank Paulson is not paying them off over a decade or more like the schlubs who placed their bets with Lehman, he’s paying them off immediately.
Personally, I look at that, and I am killing myself that I didn’t place a bet with these guys.