Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Other Shoe

According to investigative reporter Greg Palast, however, the motivations go much deeper and may involve that Goldman Sachs is misusing TARP bailout funds as a “political weapon” to bully smaller banks.

Back in 2008, Goldman Sachs received $10 billion from the US Treasury under the TARP program that had been established to bail out failing commercial banks. The firm was neither failing nor a commercial bank, but the Secretary of the Treasury at that time, Henry Paulson, was a former Goldman Sachs chairman, and that was sufficient.

There was one catch, however, which was that “Goldman would have to return a chunk of the public’s billions in the form of loans for low-income customers and members of its ‘community’, as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Problem: Goldman has, it seems, no low-income customers, nor a ‘community’. Goldman was directed to find poor people and a community and hand over some cash.”

Goldman complied in part by giving $5000 to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union for its 25th anniversary.

Raw Story

Wow! Big spender. Can that even be considered to fulfill the requirement? And better yet - then they took that piddling sum away when the credit union advertised that it would honor OWS at the party. (Emphasis mine.)

Video report seemingly showing a woman being arrested in front of CitiBank when she tried to go in and close out her account to move it to a small bank, and claiming that Goldman Sachs threatened legal action against the credit union for honoring OWS before pulling their $5,000....

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