Your tax dollars at work, hypocrisy in action. The same thing they accuse Goldman Sachs for doing, they are doing as individuals. GREAT!! And if you want to say, NO, SLAV, Goldman Sachs is accused of fraud, well there's plenty of fraud in D.C., correct?
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/congressional-hypocrites-were-betting-against-stocks-as-country-collapsed-477789.html;_ylt=Areu3uybWnPXZ_iIKoYTB8W7YWsA;_ylu=X3oDMTE2M2hvOWQ3BHBvcwMxMQRzZWMDdG9wU3RvcmllcwRzbGsDY29uZ3Jlc3Npb25h?tickers=gs,xlf,spy,^dji,^gspc,^ixic,qqqq&sec=topStories&pos=9&asset=&ccode=
Remember all that scorn in Congress about evil shortsellers betting against America and bringing the country down?
Well, it turns out Congress-people did it, too. And they used derivatives to do it, which they now say they abhor.
(For the record, we have no problem with shortselling or derivatives, and we find the routine scapegoating of both after market crashes ludicrous. But if you're going to complain about how awful shortselling is and how evil and venal people are for doing it, you should probably abstain from the practice yourself.
And, yes, most of the folks here were just betting against stocks, not actually selling stocks short. But it's the same idea. To use their own tortured, populist logic, they were betting against the country and their 401k-holding constituents!)
Jason Zweig, Tom McGinty, and Brody Mullins in the WSJ:
Some members of Congress made risky bets with their own money that U.S. stocks or bonds would fall during the financial crisis, a Wall Street Journal analysis of congressional disclosures shows.
Senators have criticized Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for profiting from the housing collapse. And Congress is considering legislation to curb Wall Street risk-taking, including the use of financial instruments known as derivatives and of leverage, or methods that amplify returns.
According to The Journal's analysis of congressional disclosures, investment accounts of 13 members of Congress or their spouses show bearish bets made in 2008 via exchange-traded funds—portfolios that trade like stocks and mirror an index. These funds were leveraged; they used derivatives and other techniques to magnify the daily moves of the index they track.
And what were the regulators doing while the financial crisis brewed and bubbled. Well, they missed the Madoff scandal, they missed the Sanford scandal, they missed the sub-prime debacle.. WHY, YOU ASK?. Maybe this explains it.
According to CNN report:
Report: SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed
April 23, 2010 12:31 p.m. EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/23/sec.porn/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
So just like the health care reform debacle--which does nothing to contain costs by ignoring tort reform--we will get financial reform, that does nothing to address the REAL underlying problems that got is here--GOVERNMENT MEDDLING AND INCOMPETENCE.
And what will come next, no doubt, is REFORM of the energy industry. So we'll have more central planning of huge chunks of our economy by government bureaucrats. Great, ask Greece how that's working out for them. What's happening in Greece is a preview of coming attractions over here in the good old U.S.A. given the track we seem to be taking.
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