The destructive aspect of nature was made part of Hindu Mythology/Theology in the personification of Shiva, a major deity and aspect of the Hindu Great trinity or triad: Brahma (Creator), Vishnu (Preserver) and Shiva (Destroyer).
If there is any force in our modern 21st Century world that has taken on the role of Shiva in current events, it has to be America’s unregulated, amoral mega-financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs who have essentially spread the Gospel of Greed throughout the world wherever they can find suckers to buy their toxic financial “products” (i.e., securitized streams of income known as “derivatives”).
In America when we think of derivatives we naturally imagine the home mortgage market, in which Goldman and others took bundles of mortgages, wrapped their income streams together into large bundles and sold off pieces of that mortgage income as securities. They then sold off insurance against defaults on those mortgages (the infamous Credit default Swaps or CDS which we now now were nothing but paper promises often worth less than the paper they were printed upon) as part of the package.
Of course they charged fees for all the services they provided in connection with these products, while helping to create the largest speculative real estate bubble in history. A bubble, that when it burst nearly brought down the economies of the world. Just not the economy of Goldman Sachs and a select few other financial behemoths managed through their adroit use of influence with politicians, their massive infiltration of the Federal Government in the higher echelons of the Republican and Democratic Parties, and sheer ruthlessness managed to turn the sow’s ear of financial devastation into a silk purse filled with gold provided by our own government.
But these derivatives of mass financial destruction are not just limited to mortgage backed securities. Just ask the Greeks who have learned the hard way that when the scam artists who work for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan (and others) come calling bearing “gifts” to solve all their financial woes it’s best to slam the door in their faces.
At the heart of the worldwide banking meltdown are those mysterious unregulated derivatives that Goldman and JPMorgan led the way in selling. But Greece’s case did not involve the usual questionable mortgages packaged into derivatives with credit default swaps backing them up, but rather expected revenue on airport fees and other potential sources of the cashed-strapped government’s future income. […]
As a result of such shenanigans back in 2001, Greece was allowed to join the European Union while running up enormous debt that went undetected. Greece’s neighbors will now be forced to bail it out, much as U.S. taxpayers have done for banks as a result of the scams Goldman and other financial houses pulled off in this country. The common denominator is that the packagers of the collateralized debt securities, be they based on subprime mortgages or government airport fees, have no real interest in the integrity of the packages, for they will balance them out with credit default swaps that pay off when the assets prove toxic. And they will make their lucrative commissions coming and going, no matter what goes wrong. Even after all the trouble in Greece, Goldman President Gary D. Cohn was back in that country last November with a new derivative scam based on potential revenue from Greece’s health care system. […]
The U.S. comptroller of the currency estimates that Goldman Sachs has a derivative “credit exposure” that is a whopping 858 percent of its risk-based capital and that JPMorgan Chase is in second place at 290 percent. That statement calls into question the savvy of President Obama, who crowed just last week in defense of Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, his old Chicago buddy who heads JPMorgan Chase, “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.” Tell it to the Greeks.
No doubt, Goldman (or one of its competitors) will someday offer to collateralize the income stream from cow and pig shit (believe it or not there is a market for it), if it hasn’t done so already. It would be the perfect product line for them, since they are already bullshit artists of the highest order.
These purveyors of heavily perfumed manure based “financial products” continue to operate under a veil of secrecy and an utter lack of transparency. Republicans (and more than a few bought and paid for Democrats) tell us this is how it should be, that we don’t need to put regulatory shackles on these Masters of the Universe, and that the people who run these monolithic empires of smoke and mirrors are smart, “savvy businessmen” who would never steer us wrong.
And you wonder why the American people, especially the great unwashed non-political masses, hold politicians in such low esteem. It’s because we know that they are servants; not our servants, but the servants of a higher power: Whoever has the most money to offer them for their votes. The amazing thing is how cheaply they sell themselves.