This can't be true can it?

[Template]

You want to make Goldman Sachs and the rest frightened?  Do what the Japanese Ministry of Finance threatened to do in 1985, when Merrill Lynch tried to fuck them over: put them through an audit.  Every damn day.  Until they get the hint.  A Ministry-sanctioned full audit is an especially slow and ritualised form of torture, which makes running the business almost impossible.  Computers are compounded, filing cabinets are taken away for photocopying....normal operations are impossible.

Wow.  It's like putting a corporation under house-arrest.  I like it.

[Iason Ouabache]

You want to make Goldman Sachs and the rest frightened?  Do what the Japanese Ministry of Finance threatened to do in 1985, when Merrill Lynch tried to fuck them over: put them through an audit.  Every damn day.  Until they get the hint.  A Ministry-sanctioned full audit is an especially slow and ritualised form of torture, which makes running the business almost impossible.  Computers are compounded, filing cabinets are taken away for photocopying....normal operations are impossible.

Wow.  It's like putting a corporation under house-arrest.  I like it.

LOL, BUREAUCRACY!

[Cramulus]

In Bureaucracy, there is HOPE!

[Richter]

$20 they have good lawyers and will get the charges dismissed.

Lawyers who know how much they made out with, and how much they can bleed them for if they drag out the litigation.  It'd be a phyrric victory, but the longer pressure is kept on them, the longer they hemorhage cash into defense, the more they loose.   

All good except...whose money is Goldman Sachs spending in their defense, again?  I mean, they just got given tens of billions of Treasury funds, had their best two years of business ever and have their guys sitting on all the major financial government institutions, I don't think lawyers fees are an issue here.

Also, the UK has already shown itself to be utterly without balls when it comes to Goldman Sachs - like when they threatened to move 20% of their staff to Spain to escape a one off "supertax", and the Treasury quavered like fools.

You want to make Goldman Sachs and the rest frightened?  Do what the Japanese Ministry of Finance threatened to do in 1985, when Merrill Lynch tried to fuck them over: put them through an audit.  Every damn day.  Until they get the hint.  A Ministry-sanctioned full audit is an especially slow and ritualised form of torture, which makes running the business almost impossible.  Computers are compounded, filing cabinets are taken away for photocopying....normal operations are impossible.

  I love the Japanese take on buisiness politics.

[Telarus]

Brilliant.

[Cain]

You can also apply various counterterrorism and drug wars legislation to them quite easily.

You don't get to be as big as Goldman Sachs or the like without some dodgy money going through your system (naturally I think this is a feature, not a bug).

[Cain]

IOW, if a government wants to nail you, they can find a way.  You think all those lawyers in political office is a coincidence?  The fact that they're not using moves and tools like this tells you everything you need to know about their priorities.  Mouth off about radical Islam and you deserve to be assassinated, run the economy into the ground and get billions in extra funding and maybe a couple of lameass lawsuits.

WWMD?  M is for Machiavelli here. 

The duke, therefore, having acquired the Romagna and beaten the Colonna, while wishing to hold that and to advance further, was hindered by two things: the one, his forces did not appear loyal to him, the other, the goodwill of France: that is to say, he feared that the forces of the Orsini, which was using, would not stand to him, that not only might they hinder him from winning more, but might themselves seize what he had won, and that the King might also do the same. Of the Orsini he had a warning when, after taking Faenza and attacking Bologna, he saw them go very unwillingly to that attack. And as to the king, he learned his mind when he himself, after taking the duchy of Urbino, attacked Tuscany, and the king made him desist from that undertaking; hence the duke decided to depend no more upon the arms and the luck of others.

For the first thing he weakened the Orsini and Colonna parties in Rome, by gaining to himself all their adherents who were gentlemen, making them his gentlemen, giving them good pay, and, according to their rank, honouring them with office and command in such a way that in a few months all attachment to the factions was destroyed and turned entirely to the duke. After this he awaited an opportunity to crush the Orsini, having scattered the adherents of the Colonna. This came to him soon and he used it well; for the Orsini, perceiving at length that the aggrandizement of the duke and the Church was ruin to them, called a meeting at Magione, in the territory of Perugia. From this sprung the rebellion at Urbino and the tumults in the Romagna, with endless dangers to the duke, all of which he overcame with the help of the French. Having restored his authority, not to leave it at risk by trusting either to the French or other outside forces, he had recourse to his wiles, and he knew so well how to conceal his mind that, by the mediation of Signor Paolo [Orsini] — whom the duke did not fail to secure with all kinds of attention, giving him money, apparel, and horses — the Orsini were reconciled, so that their simplicity brought them into his power at Sinigaglia. Having exterminated the leaders, and turned their partisans into his friends, the duke had laid sufficiently good foundations to his power, having all the Romagna and the duchy of Urbino; and the people now beginning to appreciate their prosperity, he gained them all over to himself.

Cesare Borgia wouldn't put up with this shoddy crap. 

[The Wizard]

[Cain]

John Robb seems to agree with me:

Does this [the GS fraud charges] signal a reversal in the titanic life and death struggle between nation-states and the global financial oligarchy?  No.  The amount of lawfare needed to reverse the course of this war before sovereign defaults litter the battlefield is immense:  thousands of trials, trillions in assessed damages, and tens of thousands sent to jail.  Even that might not be enough without a long campaign of financial COIN to pacify and disassemble the too-big-to-fail banks and hedge funds

And the fact no-one is preparing for this tells you exactly where the priorities of nation-states now lie.

[Cramulus]

the vultures circle overhead!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503983_162-20002912-503983.html

The potential implications of the SEC fraud case against Goldman Sachs has captured the attention of Wall Street, but AIG may be watching closer than most.

The former insurance giant, which is now controlled by the U.S. government, is examining whether it has grounds for its own complaint against the powerhouse bank after losing billions of dollars insuring similar mortgage-backed securities to the one at the heart of the SEC charges, reports the Financial Times.

[Requia ☣]

I do kindof wonder if they're trying to use the tools they use to go after organized crime, pick the guy most likely to roll over on everyone else and lean on him.

I can't see it working though, electronic records are real fickle, and Goldman Sachs has already demonstrated they have the talent for serious cybercrime (where the hell is the prosecution on THAT anyway?), faking all the documents at the company to make it look like this guy is the only one responsible is probably already finished (assuming that the SEC isn't cooperating in the first place).

[BADGE OF HONOR]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2010953720100420?type=marketsNews

tl;dr: Republican lawmakers accuse the SEC of being biased towards the democratic party and making politically-based moves.  Oh, the irony.

[Jenne]

...AND "too big to fail" is left out of the big, bad finance reform bill.

Gee...couldn't have called THAT one.