Huge Banking Firm's Man Takes Over Treasury Again

REUTERS - President George W. Bush announced on Tuesday that Treasury Secretary John Snow was resigning and that he has nominated Goldman Sachs chairman Henry Paulson to replace him. . . "Hank shares my philosophy that the economy prospers when we trust the American people to save, spend and invest their money as they see fit," Bush said.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2019227

PAULSON IS THE second top official of Goldman Sachs to be appointed Treasury Secretary in recent years, the other being Robert Rubin in the Clinton Admnistration

WIKIPEDIA - As of 2005,[ Goldman Sachs] employed 22,425 people worldwide. Total net revenues for FY 2005 were $25 billion.

A 2002 REPORT by the Project on Government Oversight found that Goldman Sachs had paid $40 million in fines, penalties, restitution, or settlements for mishandling government contracts.

KATHLEEN DAY WASHINGTON POST - Fannie Mae engaged in "extensive financial fraud" over six years by doctoring earnings so executives could collect hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, federal officials said yesterday in a report that portrayed a company determined to play by its own rules. . . They portray the District-based mortgage funding giant -- a linchpin of the nation's housing market -- as governed by a weak board of directors, which failed to install basic internal controls and instead let itself be dominated and left uninformed by chief executive Franklin Raines and Chief Financial Officer J. Timothy Howard, who both were later ousted.

The result was a company whose managers engaged in one questionable maneuver after another, including two transactions with investment banking firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, OFHEO said, was always the same: To shape the company's books, not in response to accepted accounting rules but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for executives including Raines, Howard and others.

GREG PALAST, 2001 - Three confidential documents from inside the World Trade Organization Secretariat and a group of captains of London finance, who call themselves the "British Invisibles," reveal the extraordinary secret entanglement of industry with government in designing European and American proposals for radical pro-business changes in WTO rules. One set of documents, minutes of the private meetings of the Liberalization of Trade in Services committee, obtained by BBC television's Newsnight program and Corp Watch, record 14 secret meetings, from April 1999 and February 2001, between Britain's chief services trade negotiators, the Bank of England and the movers and shakers of the Euro-American business world. Those attending the closed LOTIS include Peter Sutherland, International Chairman of US-based investment bank Goldman Sachs and formerly the Director General of the World Trade Organization . . .

The minutes indicate that the government officials shared confidential negotiating documents with the corporate leaders as well as inside information on the negotiating positions of the European community, the US and developing nations. At the meeting held on February 22nd of this year, Britain's chief negotiator on the General Agreement on Trade in Services made reference to the European Commission's paper on industry regulation which had been privately circulated to LOTIS members for their comment.

http://prorev.com/www.corpwatch.org/issues/wto/featured/2001/gpalast.html

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - 1984: Foreshadowing future Wall Street interest in Clinton, Goldman Sachs, Payne Webber, Salomon Brothers and Merrill Lynch all show up as financial backers of [Governor Clinton].

SAM SMITH, SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1993 - Early in the administration, the new national economic advisor Robert E. Rubin wrote numerous clients [including Enron] of his former firm, Goldman Sachs, inviting them to stay in touch. Rubin, who had been one of Wall Street's "four horsemen" of leveraged takeover arbitrage, and who would shortly submit a financial disclosure form listing an estimated income in 1992 of $26.5 million from his GS partnership, wrote: "I hope I can continue to rely on your interest and support as I move from Broad Street in New York to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC., and would be grateful for whatever suggestions you would offer."

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