Rebel Traders – Analysis Without The Hype

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THE From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they’re about to do it again -~&~- By MATT TAIBBI fiE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells li~e money. In fact, the history of the re~~:!t financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us knowtbe major players. As George Bush’s lastTreasurysecretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect ofthe bailout, a suspiciously self·serving plan to funnel trillions ofYour Dollars to a. handful ofbis old friends on Wan Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citi~ group – which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rugfoT his office as his company was imploding; a former GoIdm”n banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulwn, who used billions in taxpayerfunds to help Bank ofAmerica rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head ofWachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staffduring the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyistjust a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, wbich forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange. the last two heads of the ILLUSTRATIONS BY VICTOR JUHASZ S2· ROLI.ING STONll, JUI.Y 9-23.2009 Federal Reserve Bank of New York – which, incidentally, is now in charge ofoverseeing Goldman – not to mention … Eut then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain – an extremely unfortunate loophole in tbe system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a Society governed passivelyby free markets and free elections, orga~ nized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere – high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to payoff hailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense. Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth – pure profit for rich individuals. They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The Cannula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itselfin the middle of a. specula.tive bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lowedloors ofsocietywith the aid ofa crippled and cormptstate that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when il all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lend ing us back our own money at interest, selIingthemselves as men above greed,just a bunch ofreally smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s – and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. Ifyou want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went – and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long – including last year’s strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oi!. There were a lot oflosers in each ofthose bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn’t one ofthem. IF AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN. BUBBLE #1 THE GREAT DEPRESSION G OLDMAN WASN’T ALWAYS A TOO-BIG-TO-I’AIL Wall Street behemoth, the rulhless face of killor-be-killed capitalism on steroids – just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in lhe use of commercial paper, 64′ ROLLING STONB, JULY 9-23, 1009 which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan. You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman’s first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shit10ads of money. In that ancient history there’s really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 19208, This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Eack then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an ~investment trust.” Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept bidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 19905, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new’ generation of regula.r-guy investors into the speculation game. Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over aga.in, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold go percent of them to the bungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part ofits holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenan~ doah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund – which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldma.n hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldma.n. Ofthe 7,250,000 initial shares of Elue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah – which, ofcourse, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading. The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was· a daisy chain ofborrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in perfonnance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn’t hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pa.y back your investors, and everyone gets massacred. In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled ~In Goldman Sachs We Trust,~ the famed economist Jobn Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market’s historic crash; in today’s dollars, the losses the hank suffered totaled $475 billion. -It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan inslUlity,” Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. -Ifthere must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale,’” BUBBLE #2 TECH STOCKS F AST-PORWARD ABOUT 65 YEARS. GOLDMAN NOT only survived the crash tha.t wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it Wellt on to become the chief underwriter to the country’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg. who rose from the rank ofjanitor’s assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initia.l public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet,eating Death Star ofpolitical influence it is today, but it was a. top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street. It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm’s mantra, “long-term greedy’- One former Goldman ban ker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. “We gave back money to ‘grownup’ corporate cli.ellts who had made bad deals with us.~ he says. “Everything we did was legal and fair – but ‘Iong-teon greedy’ said we didn’t want to make such a profit at the clients’ collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace. But then, something happened. It’s hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman’s cochairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National &0nomic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a. doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face ofthe Earth, with Newton, Einstein. Mozart and Kant running far behind. Rubin was the prototypica.l Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short ofan apology for being so much smarter than you, and he ex-uded a Spack-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliche that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy – a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chiefAlan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE TaE WORLD. And “what Rubin thought,~ mostly, was that the AmericlUl economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House ll made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy – beginning with Rubin’s complete and total failure to regulate his old tirm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits. The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. CQmpanieg that weren’t much more than pot-fueled i.deas scrawled on napkins by up-too-Iate bongsmokers were taken public via {POs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if hanks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only ifyou took your money out before the melon hit the pavement. It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn’t know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules ofthe game, making the deals look better than they actua1\ywere. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system – one for the insiders who knew the real numbers. and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrationa.1. While Goldman’s later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in thelnternet years was to abandon its own industry’s standards of quality control. “Since the Depression, there wet”e strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when takiDg a company public,” says one prominent hedge-fund manager. “The company had to be in business fol’ a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash. Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: “Their analysts were out there say~ ing BulIshit.com is worth $100 a share.” The problem was, nobody t£lld investors that the rules had changed. ·Everyone on the inside knew,~ the manager says. 4Bob Rubin sure as hen knew what the underwriting standards were. They’d been intact since the 1930s.” Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. 4In the early Eighties. the major underwriters insisted on three years ofprofitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future.” Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king ofthe Internet era. Ofthe 240 companies it took public in 1997. a third were losing money at the time ofthe IPO. In 1999, at the height ofthe boom, it took 47 compall 56 • ROLLING STONE. JULY 9-:13, 2009 nies public, iTlcluding stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 140 of which were money losers at the time. Ai; a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provMed profits far more volatile than those ofits competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average ofI81 percent. How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called “laddering,U which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here’s how it works: Say you’re Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual tenns: You’ll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a “road show~ to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price -let’s say Bullshit.com’s starting share price is $15 – in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO’s future, knowledge that wasn’t disclosed to the day-trader schmucks who only had the prospec~ tus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of slJares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company’s price, which of course was to the bank’s benefit – a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money. Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety ofInternet IPOs, including Webvan and Net2ero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager ofCramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman. “Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator,” Maier said. “Theytotally fueled the bubble. And it’s specifi· callythat kind ofbehavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation – manipulated up and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in.” In 2005, Goldman agreed’to pay $40 million for its laddering violations – a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all o(the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions (or this story.) Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was “spinning,” better known as bribery. Here the investment bank wouLd offer the executives ofthe newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged ill spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price – ensuring that those “hot~ openingprice shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullsrul.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares 58 • ROLLI NO STONlI, J UL>’ 9-’13, 2009 GOLDMAN SCAMM’ED HOUSING INVESTORS BY BETTING AGAINST ITS OWN CRAPPY MORTGAGES. of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business effectively robbing all of Bullshit’s new shareholders by diverting cash that should ha.ve gone to the company’s bottom line into the private bank account of the company’s CEO. In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman’s board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, GoldmaTl gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal a.ge – ‘!Yco’s Dennis Kozlowski and Enron’s Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as ~an egregious distortion of the facts” – shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. ”The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk,” then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. “Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business. Such practices conspired to tum the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ. alone. But the real problem wasn’t the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers. who received hefty bonuses for tamperiTlg with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age offreely flowing capital and publicly owned unancial companies, bubbles lIJ’e incredibly easy to inflate. and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater. Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits – an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman’s mantra of “long-term greedyD vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement. The market was no longer 8. rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean ofSomeone Else’s Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money int.o bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year. so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out ofGoldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state ofNew Jersey. (One ofthe truly comic moments in the historyofAmerica’s recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine ofNew Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994to1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that “I’ve never even heard the tenn ‘laddering’ »efore.~) For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent – they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, D • “. Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin. be tightly regulated – and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Bl’Ooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses. More regulation wasn’t exactly what Goldman had in mind. ”The banks go crazy – they want it stopped,n says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University ofMaryland. “Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chiefArthur] Levitt want it stopped.n Clinton’s reigning economic foursome – “especially Rubin,” according to Greenberger – called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regu laUon of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the eYrc of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session. Congress pa.ssed the Dow-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an n,OOo~pagc spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity. But the story didn’t end there. AIG, a major purveyor of defaLllt swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-defa.ult protection a.s it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. Eythe peak oHhe housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities – a third of which were subprime – much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap. Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006-83. Many ofthe mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they bad in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent ofthe loans included little or no documentation – no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody’s projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 pel·cent ofthe mortgages were in default T/Jithin 18 rrwnths. Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangstel’-status firms like Countrywide and selling ROLLINO STONIl, JULY 9-23,2009 ·159 BUBBLE #3 THE HOUSING CRAZE disaster that was the housi ng hubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren’t in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of”10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a rcal first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw aU that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex~cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar. None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those shitty mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance coropames and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-eon’s mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can’t write U\ese mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn’t know what they are. Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds ofdifferent mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then th~y sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rat.ed investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIGto provide insurance – known as credit-default swaps – on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet betweenAIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default. AIG is betting they won’t. There was only one problem with the deals: All ofthe wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives Hke CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings hoth lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in J994. A rellQrt that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments G OLDMAN’S ROLE IN THK SWRKl’ING GLOBAL them off w mun icipillities and pensioners – old people, for God’s sake – pretending the whole time that it wasn’t grade-D horscshit. Bllt even as it was doing Sll, it was taking short positions in the same market. in essence betting aj1;ainSllhe same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. uThe mortgage sector continues to he challenged,” David Viniar, the bank’s chief financial offieer. boasted ill 2007. uAs a re~;ult, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions, … However, our risk bias in that mal’ket was to be short, and that net short position was profitable.” In other word.~, the mortgages it. was selling were for chumps. The real mOlley was in betting ag-dinst those same mortgages. uThat’s how audacious these assholes are,” says one hedge-fund manager. “At least with other bank~, yOIl could say that they were just dumb – they believed what they were selliIlK, and it blew them up. Goldman knew wha.t it was doing.” I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you’re actually betting against – particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer – doesn’t amount to securities fraud. It’s exactly securities fraud.” he says. “ft’s the heart ofsecurities fraud. n Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet [PO craze, Goldman wa.s hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing buhble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters tin selling bundles ofcrappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pensioll funds, which lost a~ much as $100 million in O\e investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off ....irtually scot-free, staving offpmscclltiol1 by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million - about what the hank's eDO division made in a day ann a half during the real estate boom. The effects of the noosing bubble are well known - it led more or less directly w the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps wa<; in significant pa.rt compo.~ed ofthe insmance that hanks like Goldman bought against their own hOllsing portfolios. In fact, at least $1.3 billion of the taxpayer Dloney given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning th:lt the bank made out on the housing bubble tWice: It fucked the investors \,,1\0 bought their l\orseshit COOs by betting against its own crappy product. then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay otJ'those same bets. And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the ba.nk, Goldman made sllre it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006. the firm's payroll ju roped to $16.5 billion .. an average of $622,000 per employee. As a GoJdma.n spokesman explained, UWe work very hard here." But the best was yet to come. While the collap!;C of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world l1eeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down - and almost single-ha.ndedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with. U BUBBLE #4 $4A GALLON B GOLDMAN TURNED A SLEEPY. OIL MARKET INTO A GIANT BETTING PARLOR -- SPIKING PRICES AT THE PUMP. Conl.1'ibuting editor MATT TAl BBI wrote ahout tlw collapse ofAIG, and the resulting bailout, in "The Big Takeover" -in RS 107.';. 60 • ROLLING STON\<. JULY 9-23, 2009 y THE IIl\GINNING OF 2008. TliK FIl-l ... NCIAL world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past lWO and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't. leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, lPG, 8ubprime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now finnly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDGR were about tA) join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years - the notion tllat housing prices never go down - was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bnllshit paradigm to sling, Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market - stuff you could to\l(·.h: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar. the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of2007 to a hij1;h of $147 in the summer of 2008. That summer. as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic exa.mple of how Republicans and Democrats rcspond to crises by engaging in fier<..'e exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would he "very helpful in the short term,~ while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arUl yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out. But it was all a Iil'~ While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up. the short·tenn flow has actually been increasing. Tn the six months beforc prices spiked., according to the u.s. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-tenn supply of oil rising, the demand tor il was falling - which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down. &> what causell the huge spike in oil prices'~ Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help - there were other pla.yers in the physical-commodities market - but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors detenTlined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casinO. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures - agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amou nt ofspeculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 pcrcent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was lraded 27 times, on average, before it wa..~ actually delivered and consumed. As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The com- modities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores ofhis crop. Whcn no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator,n who would slore the grain a.nd sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for hiS crops. In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. 1fthat happened, prices would be affected by something oilier than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading (',ommission - the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps - to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result ofthe CITC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years. All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops - Wa.ll Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices a/,so needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too. This was complete and uHer crap - the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain dis, tinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, aIru1zingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itselfa physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. Jn the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies. Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities mal"kets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. Thai 199) letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market - driven there by fear of the faning dollar and the housing crash - finally over· whelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers - and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a. gallon every time we pulled up to the pump. What js even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most ofthe other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head ofthe division oftrading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair ofthe CFrC,u sa.ys Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committeejust happened to be at a. briefing when officials from the CFrC made an offhand reference to the exemptions. "1 had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy,~ the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the mid· die of it, they start saying, 'Yeah, we've been iSSUing these letters for years now.' I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'n The CFTCcited arulethat prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 year8 earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 ofthe 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any . information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example ofhow complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over. Armed with the semisecret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index - which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil- became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all weU and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions - meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge-fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up." Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by 1M New Ycn'k Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested (Cont.on98) ROl.LING STONll, JUL\' 9-23, ~009 • 6l GOLDMAN SACHS [Cant.from 61J in oil through its commodities-trading subsidiary, J. Awn; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadclI.st the fact that be owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fau1t of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives." But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices - it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the hOllsing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future ofendlessly rising prices. In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retil-emenl System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn'tjust come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World. Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now,n says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a IO-year low. And yet pricesareup." Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have notlling to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his 98 head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it." BUBBLE #5 Rigging the Bailout lapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things hunlming - this tim~, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hUllt has become the only remaining pool ofdumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to /lex its muscle. Itbegan in September oflastyear, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engi neered a rescue ofBear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let LehmanBrothers· one ofGold man's last real competitors - collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, Hand an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 bil- A FTER THE OIL BUIlBLE COL- FROM ASBURY PARK TO THE PROMISED LAND: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF' lion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue elfort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired aula workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents fur every dollar they are owed. Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-yearold Goldman banker named Nee] Kashkari in charge ofadministering the funds. In ord~r to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bankholding company, a move that allows it access not only to $]0 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding – most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guara.nteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs – and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients ofthe monies remain almost entirely secret. Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman’s primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time ofits announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conllict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldma.n stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in Ma.y, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman – New York Fed president William Dudley – is yet another former Goldmanile. The collective message of all this – the AlG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds – is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn’t a free market at aU. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumsta.nces. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration ofsupreme privilege. “In the past it was an implicit advantage,~ says Simon Johnson, an economics profes99 official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. “Now it’s more of an explicit advantage.” Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its tirst moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 – with its $].3 billion in pretax losses – off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highIy suspicious $1.8 billion profit ior the first quarter of 2009 – which apparently included a large chunk ofmoney funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. “They cooked those first-quarter results six ways from Sunday,~ says one hedge-fund manager. “They hid the losses in the orphan month and caned the bailout money profit.” 1Wo more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first-quarter results. Taken together, the SOl’ at MIT and former numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using halfbaked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout. Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results ofits new “stress test” for banks seeking to repay TARP money suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn’t pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew oft’ those concerns, ,brazenly flaunting its insider status. “Theyseemed to knoweverythingthat they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after,” says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. “The government came out and said, ‘To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt ofat least five years that is not insured by FDIC – which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before.” And here’s the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, evenwhile they claim dcductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all. This should be a pitchfork-level outrage – but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One ofthe few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money,” he said, “the left is hiding it offshore.” BUBBLE #6 Global Warming early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Ohama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs – its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign – sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield ofthc bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the F AST-FORWARD TO TODAY. IT’S As envisioned by Goldman, the fight to stop global warming will become a “carbon market” worth $1 trillion a year. up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions oftaxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United Statcs in 2008? Fourteen million dollars. That is what the ,firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, orie percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion – yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year. How is this possible? According to Goldman’s annual report, the lowtaxes are due in large part to changes in the bank’s “geographic earnings mix.” In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most ofits earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their IOO • ROLLING STONE, JULY 9-23, 2009 aid of a new set of alumni occupying key governmentjobs. Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place arc Treasury chief of staffMark 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 ip carbon credits – a booming trilliondollar 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 ofthe commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: Ifthe 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 ha,ve :WilDaged to produce fewer em:issions:~Pre§i­ dent Obama conservatively estiml’j,t()~ tl~\lct about $646 billionworthof carbQ~cre4it§ will be auctioned in thc first seven yeirlii one of his top economic aides speculu,tes that the real number might be twice Qr 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 cllrbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means thllt this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be tracleq. is guaranteed to rise in price over tim.e. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annu!tlly;for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all’ electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion. Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor ofparadigmshifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profit-making slice ofthat paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is~ a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things rl’lally 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 cannotsolve the climate-change problem.” A few years later, the barik’s carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won’t be enough to fix the climate problem and eaIled for furthcr 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 ina firm ealled Changing World Technologies) and solar power ~(it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper ifthe 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 AD\/ERnSEMENT carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a Ininority stake in Blue SouTce 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 AI 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 Hanis. 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 fonner staffer on the House energy committee. Well, yOll 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 stl’uctured so th at 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-andtrade 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’1J even collected. “If it’s going to be a lax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it,” says· Michael Masters, the lledgefund director who’ spoke out against oil-futures speculation. “But we’re saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wan 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, ifit doesn’t, something like it will. The moral is 101 the same as for all the other bubbles that (}{)ldman helped create, fron\ 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 accOinplishing nothing hut 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 tor it, It’s Dot 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 th1′Ough 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 ofa thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort offeel things tbat are no longer there. But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some o[us have to play by the rules, while others get a note fronl the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free doBars 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 4) it's all going. ROLLH'" STONIe (J~N 0035'79)1:) is J\l..lb. Ii 5h~d biwec.kly excepl tfir lhe nut iSlUf in l IntroducJng BACARD~ DRAGON BERRY'", strawberry rum inlused wilh dra(JJnfTult. 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