SP Futures Hourly Chart at 2:45 PM

Cisco and Visa after the bell.

January Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.

Goldman Sachs Would Like to Pay Back Their TARP Money ASAP

Apparently this new rule about caps on executive pay was a motivation to choose other venues.

There are plenty of other feedbags from the Fed for a newly christened commercial bank, and the Fed is more tolerant of highly paid management.


Bloomberg
Goldman Sachs Would Like to Pay Back TARP Money, Viniar Says
By Christine Harper

Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which took $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury in October, would like to pay back the money from the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, said David Viniar, the firm’s chief financial officer.

“It would send a very good signal” if the firm could repay the money, he said. The firm would only do so if it got “the blessing” of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, he said at a Credit Suisse conference in Naples, Florida today.

Under current rules, Goldman and other firms that received money under TARP are required to raise common or preferred equity to replace the government funds, Viniar said. The company will consider raising money “if the markets are good,” he said.

The government investment “is not really restricting the way we do business,” Viniar said.

Goldman will also be “very cautious” about considering any acquisitions because there’s a longer record of unsuccessful deals in the financial services industry than successful ones, Viniar said. He said the firm is likely to maintain its current business of focusing on corporate and institutional clients rather than entering the retail business.

“I would not pick up the Wall Street Journal every morning looking for the big Goldman Sachs acquisition because I think you will be disappointed,” he said. “We don’t really like or know the retail business and I don’t expect that to change too much.”

A Modest Proposal from Joe Stiglitz

"..."The government should allow every distressed bank to go bankrupt and set up a fresh banking system under temporary state control rather than cripple the country by propping up a corrupt edifice."

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist

This is the procedure, that is what we do with insolvent banks. That is what the FDIC is for.

We don't prop up the bad banks. The regulators help them become solvent through a resolution and restructuring of their bad debt, and then either sell them, sell their assets independently, or allow them to re-emerge as good banks once they are solvent

This is precisely what Le Café Américain has had on the menu for the banks over the past seven months, with some detail behind it, including systemic reforms.

We do not burden an entire national economy, we do not cripple an entire banking industry including many regional banks who have done no wrong, in propping up a few insolvent institutions who arrived at that state through outrageous bad management.

There is widespread suspicion that this exercise is designed to protect a handful of large money center banks from realizing their losses - JPM, C, Morgan Stanley, B of A, and Goldman Sachs.

Let the system work. Do not continue to privatize the gains and subsidize the losses.

And then let the criminal and civil investigations of the major actors in this modern tragedy begin, if we ever wish to 'restore confidence' in Wall Street in the public and the rest of the world.

Markopolos Delivers Multiple Bombshells in Congressional Testimony

"Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long.

It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most.

They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives."

Harry Markopolos in Congressional Testimony

Henry Markopolos, the Madoff Ponzi scheme whistleblower, is delivering bombshell testimony with few punches pulled before the US Congress this morning.

Among other things:

- There were 14 'feeder funds' operating with Madoff to channel investor to him. Only two have been publicly revealed. There are twelve more. Markopolos is going to be speaking with French and Swiss authorities to reveal others who have not yet acknowledged their role, and their losses.

- There are undisclosed investors in the Madoff scheme among prominent Europeans, and even royalty.

- Markopolos feared for his life because of the involvement of the Russian mob and South American drug cartels involved with Madoff, and because of the stonewall treatment his repeated and detailed disclosures received at the SEC.

- The SEC is overstaffed with young attorneys who do not understand the business they are regulating. They need to hire older hands with direct financial markets experience and accounting backgrounds and incent them.

- The SEC does not wish to pursue 'the big cases.' They prefer to act on small cases.

- The SEC has done little as compared to the State Attorneys General.

- The SEC has a problem described by others as 'deep capture' wherein the regulators look to jobs in their industry after a few years in the agency. Their management protects industry insiders from investigation.

- Madoff did not act alone. There were enablers who were willfully blind, and there were those who were directly involved with him in his deception.

- The SEC does not even have access to Bloomberg terminals or read the WSJ or Barrons

- The new head of the SEC, Mary Shapiro, needs to clean house with 'a wide broom' among the management of her new organization

- Markopolos was offered a job to head up a new super-agency several times by the Congressmen, only half in jest, but he demurred because of family commitments. Too bad because we have a hunch he'd soon be known on Wall Street as the "flagellum Dei" (Latin: "Scourge of God"),