Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Goldman Sachs' Trader Finds a New Occupy Tactic

Wake Up Congress; Before the Next Collapse

Goldman Sachs' Trader Finds a New Occupy Tactic

 

by PAM MARTENS, Counterpunch, March 19, 2012

 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/19/goldman-sachs-trader-finds-a-new-occupy-tactic/

 

In the last decade, Wall Street has evolved from

predator to organized crime with a speed dial to

Washington.  Instead of Washington reforming Wall

Street, it has seduced and corrupted Washington.  It

didn't have to come to this.

 

Since at least 1989, incredibly talented, hardworking

men and women have been leaving high paying positions

at major Wall Street institutions and alerting the

public in meticulously crafted, first-hand narratives

released by venerable publishing houses that Wall

Street wants to rip off its clients' faces.

 

On Wednesday, March 14, Greg Smith - following in the

proud lineage of Micheal Lewis, Frank Partnoy and Nomi

Prins - simply bypassed the tedious route of galleys

and nit-picking editors  and went straight to the OpEd

page of the New York Times with his resignation letter

decrying Goldman Sachs for abusing its clients.  "It

makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping

their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen

five different managing directors refer to their own

clients as 'muppets,' sometimes over internal e-mail,"

Smith said. He called the current environment at

Goldman "as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it."

 

Each day since then, corporate media pundits have

frenetically struggled to characterize the motives of

this 33-year old earning $500,000 a year.  The defining

moment in this debate came in this video where Evan

Newmark, Wall Street Journal columnist and a former

Managing Director of Goldman Sachs, asks MarketWatch

writer Jon Friedman the following question in reference

to the 3 million page hits Smith's OpEd had received on

line: "Do you think Greg Smith will have an easy time

monetizing his popularity?"  I had to play the tape

three times to be sure I wasn't hallucinating.

 

A young man throws both caution and his career to the

wind in a virtual scream for the leadership of this

country to wake up to what's still transpiring on Wall

Street and a journalist for the newspaper covering Wall

Street can only relate the selfless act to dollar

signs.  The Wall Street culture of greed is

metastasizing into the larger society at a gut churning

pace.  The assumption by Newmark is that there is no

one earning $500,000 who might love his country, its

future, the next generation's future more than his love of money.

 

Smith's choice of venue for his resignation letter to

Goldman was dramatic but his words were just more

concrete evidence of what other Wall Street veterans

have been telling the public for the past 23 years - as

Congress turned a deaf ear and proceeded to remove

barriers to facilitate more face ripping of customers.

 

In 1989, Michael Lewis wrote about his tenure at

investment bank Salomon Brothers in the bestseller

Liar's Poker.  According to Lewis, "It was assumed that

I might well put a customer or two out of business.

That was part of being a geek. There was a quaint

expression when a customer went under.  He was said to

have been 'blown up.' "

 

Frank Partnoy issued another wake up call to the public

and Congress in 1997. In his bestseller, F.I.A.S.C.O. -

Blood in the Water on Wall Street, Partnoy gave a

damning assessment of Wall Street powerhouse, Morgan

Stanley, where Partnoy worked as a derivatives

structurer: "...my ingenious bosses became feral

multimillionaires: half geek, half wolf.  When they

weren't performing complex computer calculations, they

were screaming about how they were going to 'rip

someone's face off' or 'blow someone up.' Outside of

work, they honed their killer instincts at private

skeet-shooting clubs, on safaris and dove hunts in

Africa and South America, and at the most important and

appropriately named competitive event at Morgan

Stanley: the Fixed Income Annual Sporting Clays Outing,

F.I.A.S.C.O. for short. This annual skeet-shooting

tournament set the mood for the firm's barbarous

approach to its clients' increasing derivatives losses.

After April 1994, when these losses began to increase,

John Mack's [President of Morgan Stanley] instructions

were clear: 'There's blood in the water. Let's go kill

someone.' " (Wall Street is serially enamored with

killer talk, as I previously reported here.)

 

But Partnoy, now a law professor at the University of

San Diego, did not stop with eye-opening books. He took

his case repeatedly and directly to those who had the

power to stop the financial madness before it took down

the country.

 

On January 24, 2002, Partnoy testified before the U.S.

Senate's Committee on Governmental Affairs as follows:

"After 360 customers lost $11.4 billion on derivatives

during the decade ending in March 1997, the Commodity

Futures Trading Commission began considering whether to

regulate OTC derivatives. But its proposals were

rejected, and in December 2000 Congress made the

deregulated status of derivatives clear when it passed

the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. As a result,

the OTC derivatives markets have become a ticking time

bomb, which Congress thus far has chosen not to

defuse..." That bomb went off on September 15, 2008.

Congress had six years to act and did nothing.

 

Again on March 7, 2006, Partnoy testified before the

U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban

Affairs that the credit rating agencies' "increasing

oligopoly profits are a dangerous sign, a symptom of an

infection spreading through the financial markets...The

rating agencies are conflicted, not only because

issuers pay for ratings - they also provide consulting

services and threaten unsolicited ratings. The

multi-trillion dollar credit derivatives industry...is

opaque, volatile, and downright frightening."  It

remains opaque, volatile and downright frightening today.

 

By March 3, 2010, Partnoy had decided perhaps pictures

were worth a thousand words and gave a large screen

slide presentation to the media and attendees at a

conference on markets.  With his past warnings left

unattended until financial disaster prevailed, Partnoy

still went about urging sane financial reforms that

would properly deal with Wall Street's off balance

sheet debt bombs:  "If financial reform doesn't include

reforms that would make Citigroups and other major

financial institutions' balance sheets look like

reality instead of fiction, then financial reform isn't

going to work."

 

Financial reform isn't working; in fact, the key

aspects of reform are still being negotiated with the

unprosecuted inmates 20 months after the Dodd-Frank

Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was

passed by Congress.  That so-called reform legislation

did not restore the most critical component: the

Glass-Steagall Act, which bars commercial banks holding

insured deposits from being under the same corporate

ownership as  their casino cousins - brokerage firms

and investment banks.

 

Partnoy has a new book coming out in June titled Wait:

The Art and Science of Delay, dealing with the timing

of decision making.

 

Just seven days before Greg Smith poured his heart out

to 3 million on-line readers, AlterNet published an

interview with author and cultural critic Morris Berman

conducted by Nomi Prins. Prins is a prolific Wall

Street writer who worked for Goldman Sachs as a

Managing Director from March of 2000 to her resignation

in early 2002, capping a 15-year career on Wall Street.

 (Prins, together with Krisztina Ugrin, has tirelessly

tracked the Fed's trillions in bailout funds to Wall

Street and posts them here.)

 

Berman has written a trilogy of books on the future of

America and tells Prins in this interview that America

is in irreversible decline; it is a nation of ignorant

people and hustlers and "At this point we can no more

reverse our downward trajectory than we can turn around

an aircraft carrier in a bathtub."  Berman elaborates:

 

"The dominant thinking on the left, I suppose, is some

variety of a 'false consciousness' argument, that the

elite have pulled the wool over the eyes of the vast

majority of the population, and once the latter

realizes that they've been had, they'll rebel, they'll

move the country in a populist or democratic socialist

direction. The problem I have with this is the evident

fact that most Americans want the American Dream, not a

different way of life--a Mercedes-Benz, as Janis Joplin

once put it. Endless material wealth based on

individual striving is the American ideal, and the

desire to change that paradigm is practically

nonexistent. Even the poor buy into this, which is why

John Steinbeck once remarked that they regard

themselves as 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires.'"

 

Now, I respect people who thoroughly research their

subject and write three in-depth books with endless

facts and documentation.  But something was not quite

right with the Berman assessment and it nagged me for

an entire week until Greg Smith wrote his $2.15 billion

resignation letter.  (That's the amount of market

capitalization Goldman Sachs lost that day.)

 

I went to my bookcase and pulled out the books by

Lewis, Partnoy and Prins. If hope is the last thing to

die, I wanted something to cling to.  I decided the

very existence of these books disproved Berman's theory.

 

These authors had made large salaries and succeeded on

Wall Street.  They gave it all up to educate the public

and, hopefully, spur reforms. They have relentlessly

stayed on this course despite endless disappointments

delivered by a hapless Congress.

 

And what about the thousands of Occupy Wall Street

protestors around the country who slept on concrete or

dirt in fabric tents in 30 degree weather until ejected

by force.  How about those Occupiers who were beaten,

pepper-sprayed, arrested and came right back for more.

Their American Dream, like mine, is simply a level

playing field, not a Mercedes-Benz.  If Lewis, Partnoy

and Prins were the first sounds in the rebellion,

Occupy Wall Street is a shout; Greg Smith is a scream.

 

If one needs further evidence that hope is not yet

lost, it is in the opening pages of Other People's

Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, the 2004 book

Prins wrote after leaving Goldman Sachs.  Prins gives a

poignant and candid answer for her exodus:

 

When I left Wall Street, at the height of a wave of

scandals uncovering scores of massively destructive

deceptions, my choice was based on a very personal

sense of right and wrong...So, when people who didn't

know me very well asked me why I left the banking

industry after a fifteen-year climb up the corporate

ladder, I answered, 'Goldman Sachs.'

 

"For it was not until I reached the inner sanctum of

this autocratic and hypocritical organization - one too

conceited to have its name or logo visible from the

sidewalk of its 85 Broad Street headquarters [now

relocated to 200 West Street] that I realized I had to

get out...The fact that my decision coincided with

corporate malfeasance of epic proportions made me

realize that it was far more important to use my

knowledge to be part of the solution than to continue

being part of the problem."

 

I decided to reach out to Partnoy and Prins with the

following question: "What is the one thing that could

happen in America today that would make you optimistic

that the country will find its moorings in time to save

itself." They responded as follows:

 

Frank Partnoy: "One crucial thing is for Americans to

rediscover the importance of the rule of law. Oliver

Wendell Holmes famously said that the law is a

prediction of what a judge will do. For decades, that

common law notion helped reinforce a culture of respect

and ethics as people in private and public life came to

understand that if they did something wrong, a judge

would ultimately assess their conduct and punish them

for it. Unfortunately, today we live in a country of

rules, not law, and judges are largely absent from

policy making. These rules differentially affect people

based on their race, social and economic status, and --

most importantly -- whether they work on Wall Street.

The wealthy avoid rules; the poor cannot. Until we

approach white collar crime as we do street crime,

Americans will be justified in their lack of respect

for the legal order. And respect for law is the

backbone of any society."

 

Nomi Prins: "Any potential for a more positive outcome

would have to rise from a broad population push that

renders the 99% more influential. True reform won't

manifest from the highest echelons of political

chambers or corporate boardrooms. Inequality won't be

lessened because the wealthiest individuals decide to

spontaneously share. It is up to individuals to pay

more attention to their collective, rather than

personal surroundings, despite all media messages to

the contrary. Indeed, we need to spend more time

examining what's going on, and not zoning out on some

sound bite about a Kardashian. We need to band

together, as in the Occupy movements, or even in local

communities, to demand an alternative system and become

a more unified society. Unfortunately, so much of our

current framework is stacked against this, starting

with the sheer cost of living which demands so much of

our energy. It all comes down to embracing the human

drive to connect, rather than merely survive."

 

Prins has written a novel, Black Tuesday, which reminds

us of the parallels between today's systemic Wall

Street corruption and that of 1929.  The heroine,

Leila, is given a missive by her Aunt. "Sometimes you

don't find your cause, Leila...Your cause finds you.

There is a fight buried in all of us."

 

Will that fight be unearthed in enough people to make a

difference?  Time is not our friend.

 

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. She

spent the last decade of her career advocating against

Wall Street's private justice system, which keeps its

crimes shielded from public courtrooms. She maintains,

along with Russ Martens, an ongoing archive dedicated

to this financial era at www.WallStreetOnParade.com.

She has no security position, long or short, in any

company mentioned in this article. She is a contributor

to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion,

forthcoming from AK Press. She can be reached at pamk741@aol.com.

___________________________________________

 

No comments: