Guess which company had $44.2 trillion dollars in derivative trades at the end of last year?

This article is from William D. Cohan, a former investment banker and the author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World”

www.bloomberg.com...

I was hoping to discover how that whole thing went down at the time, and how Goldman and Morgan Stanley got the Fed’s blessing but Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. did not. Also I was interested in Goldman’s interactions with the Fed since that fateful moment. My hopes were raised further when I heard from people at the firm that Goldman had reviewed the contents of what was being sent to me and that its executives seemed worried about it.

No such luck. On the disk was nothing more than a bunch of obscure -- but publicly available -- Federal Reserve documents about the details of Goldman’s assets and liabilities on a quarterly and annual basis, everything from the kinds of loans the firm had been making to the tenor of its derivatives book to whether the real-estate loans it owns were backed by commercial properties or residential properties.

The documents contained a bunch of detailed numbers (without explanation) about the kinds of risks Goldman was taking at a moment in time, thus prying open ever so slightly the firm’s black box.

For instance, who knew that at the end of December 2011 Goldman had $44.2 trillion in the notional amount of derivatives contracts on its books, about $1.3 trillion more than it did in 2010? Or that $36 trillion of that amount was for contracts of less than one year in tenor? Or that Goldman had $19 billion in insurance underwriting assets, up nearly 40 percent from the year before? Or that Goldman’s book of commercial and industrial loans was $7 billion at the end of 2011, up dramatically from the $829 million it held at the end of 2010? Or that the firm’s stash of mortgage-backed securities -- now $1.37 billion -- had nearly doubled what it had at the end of 2010?

$44.2 trillion? That is an insanely huge amount of bets. Of course the most trustworthy company in the world is the one that has those bets....Goldman Sachs.

What would happen if the crash of 08 happened again? Would that $44.2 trillion dollars just vanish?.....or would the Fed cover it?

Who are these bets on and why were they bet on in the first place?...No clue.

Although I still have no idea how Goldman makes its money, I guess it is interesting to know that the government produces mind-numbing documents containing columns of numbers and then puts them on websites buried on the Internet.

But let’s not pretend that the Fed’s carefully scripted, and untimely, release of a disk of public information to me is even remotely the way FOIA is supposed to work. Where are the documents and e-mails about how Goldman was allowed by the Fed to become a bank holding company? Where are the documents from the SEC about Goldman? Where, for that matter, are the SEC documents related to the short-dated, out-of-the-money puts that investors spent millions of dollars buying in the last week of Bear Stearns’s existence? The SEC said it was investigating who bought and sold these puts, but it has never made the results of its investigation public despite my FOIA request.

That's just 1 wall street company. Just 1.

Here's a little video that covers this story

reply to post by buni11687


Did
you
say

$44,000,000,000,000 !!

Whoa...

I cannot even comprehend this.

It is all fiat money and USURY, this is all prohibited by the major religions of the world. They have corrupted judaism and christianity and allowed this charging of interest (usury) and now they are going after Islam with prohibits this. Why do you think they are so interested in demonizing Muslims, it is because they are the only people who stand in the way of the NWO. True Muslim banks prohibit such making money out of thin air with these derivatives

$44 trillion is nearly 3 times the national debt of the USA, in exposure, at one company.

Pretty good, considering that none of this money actually exists, except on paper.

If Goldman Sachs were to collapse, it would be massively spectacular and probably take the world economy with it.

reply to post by Dustytoad


And that's JUST Goldman Sachs. Add that to the other big banks amounts (im guessing they're around the same amount), and.....well I just cannot comprehend that much money

Stock up on silver and rice and beans!

The level of Goldman intergration/infiltration in the government of the U.S. Is disgusting. Talk about a massive conflict of interest! People should be going to prision in droves for what thier doing to this country and its citizens.

Getting rid of the Federal Reserve and getting huge corps like Goldman out of our goverment needs to be paramount! Instead all the talk out there in media land is abortion and birth control. Sad.

Its obvious that the more ordinary people know about the outright fraudulent high finance convolutions that are sucking the good things even the nessessities out of their lives.....
This is stuff that we should be babbling to anyone who will listen...............44 trillion is the tip of an iceberg of theft and usury that is unequaled in human history.................These people are mad!
We get rid of the top layer, and the everything gets better for the entire world.

i would love to see what sits on the books at jp morgan, id be willing to bet (pun intended) that it's in the several hundreds of trillions.

44 trillion in one company
think of all the other crazy bankster around the world and the bets they have placed alltogether
banks must have like 300 trillion imaginary money floating around!!
just think...
that one company holds about as much debt as all the goverments in the world!
now add the rest of them!!!
not long back there was talk by lord blacksmith about a 15 trillion pound fraud involving RBS
it had started in america and got passed bank to bank (think it was goldman sachs to begin with?)

god help us...
allah help us...
buddah help us...
supreme being help us...
glaktor and the alien elite help us...
somebody!!!! god damn it!!

For the last 9 years I've been learning how to invest.

Here's where I am with it...

I'm still not threw " Learning Stockes for Dummies ". I think that's the name of my book! lol
I have 2 high-end magazine's.... One sent me this awesome dark blue coffee cup.

I finally invested a grand into a great shipping company. Lost it all in 2008.

A wall-street rocket scientist I'm not. Let me ask you... Isn't there some kind law out there that prohibits companies from becoming so big .....That.....they'll turn us into flesh eating zombies? lol or.... Fill in blank...

Great post.... I learned a lot. Side note... I love YT!!!!

Originally posted by tracehd1
For the last 9 years I've been learning how to invest.

Here's where I am with it...

I'm still not threw " Learning Stockes for Dummies ". I think that's the name of my book! lol
I have 2 high-end magazine's.... One sent me this awesome dark blue coffee cup.

I finally invested a grand into a great shipping company. Lost it all in 2008.

A wall-street rocket scientist I'm not. Let me ask you... Isn't there some kind law out there that prohibits companies from becoming so big .....That.....they'll turn us into flesh eating zombies? lol or.... Fill in blank...

Great post.... I learned a lot. Side note... I love YT!!!!

that is of course the root of the problem, laws and loop holes for the wealthy. they pay for, er um i mean lobby, our legislators to circumvent the laws to favor their ill doings. they have organized lawful theft for the elite.

Originally posted by babybunnies


If Goldman Sachs were to collapse, it would be massively spectacular and probably take the world economy with it.

BRING IT ON I say! Let those mafia scumbags deal with real people in the streets of New York when the SHTF.

reply to post by tracehd1


The stock market today is nothing but a rigged casino. Trying to pick stocks based on financial/business fundamentals is a losing proposition. The vast majority of smart investors simply use technical analysis, because everyone else does. Read Up on this guy and you'll learn a lot about how to do market timing. Heck, simply trading moving average crossovers will get you further than trying to pick stocks based on a companies fundamentals.

www.marketwatch.com...

Sounds like rumors are true, the derivatives market is bigger than the entire planets annual GDP.

Which means this system can only continue to exist as long as more bets are put on existing bets, to cover those bets.

Its like the derivatives market is being ran by the Bad Lieutenant. "Strawberry's gonna break out."

They keep upping the bet, because they have to, cause the money isn't there to cover the bet, any of the bets, and sooner than later, its all going to blow up. It will be 1929 times 1,000.

Derivatives are disgusting.

The things they are betting on have no grounds. There is no one to regulate the wins and losses.
On top of that, their bets are insured so it's close to impossible to them to lose money even in a bad bet.

They are playing in casinos where it's impossible to lose, where the house doesn't kick em out and they take the money they "won" from the general public to create debt that they won't even lend a hand to pay.

They are playing games with the whole system and they have no chances to lose the way derivatives work at the moment. Also, they do not contribute positively in any way society. They are useless middle men that don't deserve wealth from the real, sweating, bruised and thorough workers of the world.

Originally posted by poet1b
They keep upping the bet, because they have to, cause the money isn't there to cover the bet, any of the bets, and sooner than later, its all going to blow up. It will be 1929 times 1,000.

We have to find a way to neutralize those bets, anyway, they don't really exist.
I really hope there will be mass arrests that will happen like Fulford, Wilcock and Drake are talking about.

reply to post by User8911


I think it is just a matter of time until the next hiccup brings the whole system down. This is not sustainable, although I don't doubt that the people caught up in this think they can keep it going.

There won't be another bailout, we simply don't have the money to do it for one thing, and the people aren't going to support it for another.

I'd be surprised if they can keep this going for the rest of the year.

reply to post by poet1b


In a way it's almost like a collosal Ponsi scheme, the big players up top are milking it for all it's worth, reaping in huge paydays. When it collapses in of its own weight we at the bottom will be left with nothing.

Originally posted by poet1b
There won't be another bailout, we simply don't have the money to do it for one thing, and the people aren't going to support it for another.

I'd be surprised if they can keep this going for the rest of the year.

What if the whole population had a bailout?
To say we ran out money is false, because we never had it to begin with, it was almost all created out of thin air with nothing to back it up.

Everyone, keep the money you have in your locality, your country and you would be surprised how long you can last with money rolling. The only reasons we are getting out of money is because the people on top take it all and don't spend it back in the economy. Trickle down doesn't work with psychopaths only interested in big numbers that they own.