Goldman who? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Greece what? Oh we fixed that thing last week! Yeah, the Germans (who are $4.5Tn in debt), the French (who are $4.4Tn in debt), the English ($9.2Tn) and, of course, the Italians ($4Tn in debt) are gonna give the Greeks a little something to keep the lights on until Christmas. Hey the world’s supposed to end in 2012 anyway so it’s not like we gotta keep worrying about this stuff, capiche? See Merkel tells me she knows a guy who knows a guy who’s got the green to keep this whole scam going until then and, after that – who cares? It’s gonna be somebody else’s problem…
I’m not going to complain, I complained about all this stuff on our last Fuhgeddaboudit Friday, just two weeks ago – so you can read that post, where there was a chart of the XLF at $16.40 pre-Goldman and two weeks later, after our mini-crisis on Wall Street, XLF is at $16.65 – just like nothing happened.
Inflation is rising, home prices are even lower than last year, housing starts are anemic, unemployment is still a rounding error off of 10%, wages are falling, defaults on credit cards and mortgages are rising, commercial rents are going uncollected and CRE values are declining rapidly but those declines are being covered up by banks using accounting tricks to hide their losses. All forgotten about as this Friday opens almost exactly where we were last Friday.
Something DID happen happen this week. The SEC made some noise and Obama made a speech and GS fell from $185 a share to $160 a share (down 13%) and isn’t that punisment enough for putting together deals that led to the loss of $15Tn of household wealth in America? Of course Goldman wasn’t out to get us – they were simply structuring deals that would greatly reward their high net-worth clients based on the irresponsible buying patterns of our neighbors while their analysts were upgrading the housing sector to keep the suckers pouring into the other side of the bet.
Sure it’s evil and sure it led to a crisis that crippled our country and cost millions of people their jobs and homes but — oh Goldman — we can’t stay mad at you! Just give us a little stock market rally and all is forgiven but do we have to bend all the way over for you tomorrow? We’re still a little sore from last…
