Here is a series by Nathan Lewis at The Huffington Post, explaining the hidden workings of our finanical system, using Goldman Sachs as the lens. I recommend reading them.
- Do We Need Goldman Sachs?
- The GS-Files 2: Stuffing the Taxpayer
- The GS-Files 3: Heads We Win, Tails You Lose
- The GS-Files 4: Always a Winner
About the author
Lewis was Chief International Economist and later Global Strategist for firms providing investment research to institutions. He previously worked in financial journalism in Toyko. Today, he is a fund manager.
His writing has been published in the Financial Times, Asian Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Times, Daily Yomiuri, Nikkei Business, Pravda, and other publications. Nathan Lewis has also written for academic publications, and has appeared on television in Asia and the Middle East.
An original thinker — often quite radical — he writes at his website New World Economics.
Other articles by Nathan Lewis
- “Will Japan’s Leaders Finally Get It Right?”, Wall Street Journal, 15 March 2001
- “The root cause of Japanese bad debt”, Financial Times, 14 October 2002
- “Where’s The Gold?”, The Huffington Post, 26 June 2009
Afterword
For information about this site see the About page, at the top of the right-side menu bar.
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For more information from the FM site
To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp interest these days:
- About Financial crisis – what’s happening? how will this end?
- About America – how can we reform it?
- Good news about America, a collection of articles!
Posts about Goldman Sachs, the exemplar of our financial system:
- Obama makes his first major policy error, 27 February 2009
- Please read this. For the sake of yourself, your children, and their children, 25 June 2009
- About Goldman Sachs, the exemplar of our financial system, 21 July 2009
- More about “Government Sachs” (they own America; we just live here), 31 July 2009
Posts about theft pretending to be solutions
- Slowly a few voices are raised about the pending theft of taxpayer money, 21 September 2008
- The Paulson Plan will buy assets cheap, just as all good cons offer easy money to the marks, 30 September 2008
- A reminder – the TARP program is just theft, 24 November 2008
- A solution to our financial problems: steal wealth from other nations, 2 February 2009
- Stand by for action – more theft of our money being planned in Washington, 4 February 2009
- Update: yes, the Paulson Plan was just theft, 14 February 2009
- Now is the time for America to get angry, 24 March 2009
- America on its way from superpower to banana republic, 28 March 2009
- Bush’s bailout plan is now Obama’s. His quiet eloquence guides the sheep into the pen, 30 March 2009
- “The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold”, by Andy Kroll in The Nation, 28 May 2009
An underreported phenomenon is the vulture fund. Although vulture funds appear in other contexts, they buy up distressed debt from underdeveloped countries and sue in Western courts to enforce payment of this debt at full face value.
This serves to disrupt the already weak African economies. As the United Nations has recently reported, organized crime is overrunning West Africa right now. In a major new development, drug lords are beginning to use West Africa not only as a transit point for drug smuggling but to make them.
All the stuff we like to talk about – the decline of the nation state, the emergence of transnational networks, and so on – is actually happening in West Africa right now.
And the vulture funds – by weakening those states – are helping this along.
Another underreported story: the Great African Land Grab: “Why Corporations, Emerging Powers and Petro-States Are Snapping Up Huge Chunks of Farmland in the Developing World“, Scott Thill, AlterNet, 11 August 2009:
DK , the articles on your site make the hairs stand up on my neck .
The future that is unfolding is not the one most of us would want . We are not even sheep , but just helpless flotsam .
anna:
Most of what I write about would not exist if only we would legalize narcotics.