The highest-earning managers have also emerged as leading political donors. For example, Mr. Griffin, whose $26 billion firm, Citadel, is based in Chicago, was the single largest backer for Rahm Emanuel’s successful second-term mayoral campaign, donating more than $1 million. (Last month, Citadel hired Ben S. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, as a senior adviser.)
Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt
Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.
.. But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.
.. At some point Greece will have to pay up for its swap transactions, and that will impact its deficit. The bond maturities range between 10 and 15 years. Goldman Sachs charged a hefty commission for the deal and sold the swaps on to a Greek bank in 2005.
The Day Trader and the Flash Crash: Unanswered Questions
How could a small-time trader of limited means help to almost bring down one of the world’s biggest and most liquid financial markets? Why haven’t any financial institutions, particularly those that specialize in high-frequency trading, been brought to book? And, if the Justice Department’s theory of the case is true, what does it say about the fragility of the U.S. financial system?
.. But the government charges that Sarao tried “to manipulate the market for E-Minis by placing multiple large-volume sell orders on the CME (to create the appearance of substantial supply and thus drive prices down) and modifying and ultimately canceling the orders before they were executed.
.. I’m not sure whether this version of events is plausible, but let’s just assume that it is. If so, that would mean a lone trader sitting in his parents’ West London home was responsible for setting off a stampede on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean that erased trillions of dollars of wealth, albeit temporarily.
Liberty Reserve: Bank of the Underworld
According to Global Financial Integrity, a nonprofit that monitors international money laundering, Costa Rica exported $5.4 billion in laundered money in 2006, equivalent to 24 percent of its GDP. By 2012, that number was up to $21.6 billion—a whopping 48 percent of GDP.
.. Liberty Reserve did create a GAA, but it was hardly a model of transparency. In June 2010, one of Liberty Reserve’s tech experts sent an e-mail, in Russian, to several people in the company, including Budovsky, about how the GAA would work. The system would allow the Costa Rican government to “view a few statistics,” the e-mail said, but the “majority of these statistics are going to be fake.”
.. Prosecutors dismissed the idea that many legitimate businesses used Liberty Reserve. After the takedown, they noted, users were encouraged to contact the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan if they wanted their money back. According to prosecutors, only 35 people did so.