Obama All Talk, No Action on Wall Street Compensation, Cohan Says

True unemployment just crossed 16%. There are many professionals that are self-employed whom cannot find work and do not qualify for unemployment. We are approaching depression era numbers of unemployment. The service sector economy has officially failed. Our monetary system failed back in the 90's and has been supported by government borrowing prompted by propaganda aimed at protect the world from evil does of mass destruction. The United States cannot come back from whence it has never been... WE MUST REVOKE THE CHARTER OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE CORP TO SAVE THIS COUNTRY FOR THE MASSES. BEN BERNANKE SHOULD BE SHOT BY A FIRING SQUAD FOR TREASON. THE FORMER NY FRC GOVERNOR SHOULD BE SHOT FOR TREASON, PAULSON SHOULD BE SHOT FOR TREASON.

It is the survival of the politically connected. Why kid ourselves, the only ones making out in this mess are the ones with political connections. Watch and see how many politicians make out on healthcare reform. It's a joke at the expense of the middleclass. Ask your elected official if they are going to give up ANYTHING during the terrible economic times. Ask them if they are going to share the pain with the middleclass.

I'm amazed that this joker claims to know how mcuh people on Wall Street should be paid. Appropriate pay is not something that can very accurately determined, since it is impossible to know exactly how much a person is worth to the company and how much was required to get or keep them from going elsewhere. Anyone who claims to have a magic formual must 1) have aperfect evaluation metric - none have ever existed and 2) be able to figure out just exactly what the efffect on the company' s business would have been. Impossible. I also would like to know why this joker thinks that outsiders have a right to tell the company and its shareholders what to pay their executives. And is there any reason they think they have the legal right to do this with "Wall Street companies" (whatever that may mean) but not others. Legally, this is pure dumb and Cohan should seek legal advice before venturing into territory he knows nothing about. Now is Cohan similarly outraged by the high salaries of the Today crew? I am. Let's petition the courts to make sure nobody who sits on a couch spouting idle conversation that has no value whatsoever be allowed to make $40 million a year.

With all of this government intervention under the Obama Administration, one must ask when the Libs will grow up and take accountability for their actions rather than blame everything on Bush. This economy is a direct result of Obama, from his days working for Acorn, as a lawyer suing banks to grant bad loan, to selecting Tiny Tim Giethner who is bankrupt himself, to nominating Sonya Soto...something who want to set policy no be a judge, Get over it... Obama broke and owns it. This ship is going down.

tuscontee - Thursday July 02, 2009 08:47AM EDT All you grand conservatives;, where were you for the last 8 years! G. Bush and his economic guru's took us to the cleaners with no remorse, and no one seemed to object to it. You reap what you have sown, and it was sown from 2000 on, so stop blaming someone who has been in office for only 5 months. ****** Just another sap that believes everything started with Bush... For the last time, THIS MESS STARTED ABOUT 100 YEARS AGO... It caused the Great Depression... *******

Obama's actions have done nothing but create the largest budget deficit EVER. He spent more in the first two months in office than most presidents spend during 4 years. The bailouts interferred with capitalism. So much for a free market...

Capitalism is suppose to have risk so that there is reward. Government has greater risk with no incentive or reward. Supply-side will teach people to fish whereas socialism promote welfare.

This mess began as the currency pinnacled back in 1999. If the WTC did not happen to be blown up we would have begun correcting. If Dick Cheney had not committed fraud at Haliburton we would not have begun firing million dollar missiles into mountains in afghanistan. Had Iraq had a central bank we would not have invaded based on fraudulent information. We will be bombing Iran soon if history is an indicator of new debt cycles. The Dems and Repubs are all the same, just a different title. In the end, wall street will not change until WE THE PEOPLE change our Government. We must force our elected officials to follow the Constitution as many of our forefathers predicted todays events because the citizenry is too stupid or uncaring to keep its government in check. "He whom controls the currency.. controls the issues... Please stand up for yourselves America

ACORN is no longer on the side of homeowners. They are shills for the banks and now purport to be helping with loan modifications and they have no concept of the industry. They know nothing about NPV, servicing or pooling, SIV,s creidt packages. they know what the banks that are paying them are telling them. If you want to try and modify a loan through ACORN you have to sign a disclosures making you aware that ACORN is being paid by the bank that is providing the modification. EVERY lender, servicer and investor must abide by NPV calculations to stop foreclosures. If not, pull the plug and let them fail.

You guys are missing the point. Obama is worthless. We should have known that before we made the mistake of putting him in office (some of us did). Oh sure, he is a great orator, but then so was Hitler. This a stockholder issue. If senior management is taking unfair compensation, don't own the stock or band together and remove them. Don't let this born again communist get involved. I truly fear for the future of life as we know it in the USA. We are at the beginning of the end of this great experiment given to us by our forefathers.

Being a politician....spending other peoples money and never being held accountable...PRICELSS.......?..Do Obama's appointed CZARs have a pay/bonus cap?....Since they have effectively taken over the responsibilties of House/Senate committees why not fire senators/representatives?.. They are wasteful with our money, liberal trees, airplane fuel, lie, and this would save the taxpayers at least a trillion dollars and help the US meet it's mythical Kyoto carbon footprint goal.

AS ENVISIONED BY GOLDMAN, THE FIGHT TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING WILL BECOME A "CARBON MARKET" WORTH $1 TRILLION A YEAR. Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits - a booming trillion-dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance. Here's how it works: If the bill passes; there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billions worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount. The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of an electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion. Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that 'Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money." The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech ... the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market? "Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee. Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected. "If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine." Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it. It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there. But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going. I don't really have much to say about this except for 'gently caress Goldman Sachs'.

Let's dump their stock; we should buy good company, who share profit with share-holder (by giving div & yield) , not to the BS-people who bring us to this mess (sub-prim mortgage, toxic asset ....).

When sky is dark, I buy sunshine - solar stocks, SOLR, YGE, etc.

Do I hear cliches, cliches, cliches about capitalism? The idea is NOT that BIG RISK is supposed to equate to BIG REWARDS, regardless of the results. Goldman is paying people $700,000 per year to lose money in high risk scams. The BIG RISK/BIG REWARD formula should be: You get paid a % of your profits; if you lose money you don't get anything. Capaitalism: A Cup of Tall Illusions Communism: Common Nauseum Is there a path in between these two extremes? Scandanavia seemed to find one.

Republicans are Republicans till the day they die. Obama has been in office six months or so and the policies, greed, and corruption of the Bush Administration and Reagan Administrations took 12 years to destroy the US economy. Now Republicans want the Democrats to fix their mess in less than a year. Unbelievable. You filthy GOPigs will twist anything around to get what you want, more for the yourselves, the wealthy and wannabe wealthy. It is far better to move cautiously and prevent being conned by a Wall Street Republican carpetbagger into something they claim is good for America but is only good for themselves. Like CDOs for example which is the fraud that sent the US economy crashing. Every free loader on Wall Street and on Mainstreet wants to continue their unchecked greed and selfishness in the name of America. Republiscum greed and selfishness caused this financial crisis in America, let them suffer even if it means that the US people will have to suffer from it. Maybe then they will learn not to vote Republican. Google "Boycott Nebraska" for a glimpse of what Republicans are all about. DEATH TO THE GOP!

This Halliburton Fraud theory is a new one ... so, military action in Afghanistan and the subsequent contract fraud at halliburton perpetuated by Cheney unravelled the subprime lending house of cards because the Afghani poppy growers needed to invest their drug money and they put it into the subprime market and then they also got involved with the real estate market flipping houses and capitalizing on the rising market prices funding the whole thing with subprime mortgages. They then took their huge paper profits and began speculating on oil prices because some insiders in the petroleum industry indirectly connected to Bush decided to cash in on the wealthy middleclass. Then, one of them Poppy Warlords must have really pissed off Cheney becaause Cheney called the Fed and told them to get even with the Afghan Poppy Warlords and raise interest rates causing the whole house of cards to topple. Now, I understand the whole problem. I guess if you believe that, then Cheney did cause this mess.....

Republicans are Republicans till the day they die. Obama has been in office six months or so and the policies, greed, and corruption of the Bush Administration and Reagan Administrations took 20 years to destroy the US economy. Now Republicans want the Democrats to fix their mess in less than a year. Unbelievable. You filthy GOPigs will twist anything around to get what you want, more for the yourselves, the wealthy and wannabe wealthy. It is far better to move cautiously and prevent being conned by a Wall Street Republican carpetbagger into something they claim is good for America but is only good for themselves. Like CDOs for example which is the fraud that sent the US economy crashing. Every free loader on Wall Street and on Mainstreet wants to continue their unchecked greed and selfishness in the name of America. Republiscum greed and selfishness caused this financial crisis in America, let them suffer even if it means that the US people will have to suffer from it. Maybe then they will learn not to vote Republican. Google "Boycott Nebraska" for a glimpse of what Republicans are all about. DEATH TO THE GOP!

Maybe Johnny Ike....Is Another Illegal Immigrant....Where is Your Birth Certificate.??????

Republicans are Republicans till the day they die. Obama has been in office six months or so and the policies, greed, and corruption of the Bush Administration and Reagan Administrations took 20 years to destroy the US economy. Now Republicans want the Democrats to fix their mess in less than a year. Unbelievable. You filthy GOPigs will twist anything around to get what you want, more for the yourselves, the wealthy and wannabe wealthy. It is far better to move cautiously and prevent being conned by a Wall Street Republican carpetbagger into something they claim is good for America but is only good for themselves. Like CDOs for example which is the fraud that sent the US economy crashing. Every free loader on Wall Street and on Mainstreet wants to continue their unchecked greed and selfishness in the name of America. Republiscum greed and selfishness caused this financial crisis in America, let them suffer even if it means that the US people will have to suffer from it. Maybe then they will learn not to vote Republican. Google "Boycott Nebraska" for a glimpse of what Republicans are all about. DEATH TO THE GOP!