One of the downside of 'Information overload' is that we get bombarded by so much news/material that we can't make sense out of it and somehow we become paralyzed in putting two and two together. Perhaps that is the mission to saturate us with so much news that we either become cynical of every piece of information or just tune out.
Below is one of many questionable subjects surrounding Hillary Rodham Clinton which I have been researching for a little while ever since the subject of transcript of Hillary Clinton's speech to Goldman Sachs has came up.
Often I mentally and physically bookmark a news that strikes me as odd, plausible, interesting and quite often culmination of various news completes a puzzle, the big question.
The following novelette :) is an example of that which makes the attainment of the so called Transcript of her speech unnecessary, because in light of all we have come to know that speech was just a small part of the web.
In late 2011, Marc Mezvinsky (best known as the husband of Chelsea Clinton) who was working at Goldman Sachs for prior 8 years left Goldman Sachs to co-found a New York-based private equity macro-focused hedge fund firm Eaglevale Partners with two longtime Goldman partners, Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon, and with financial backing from one of the biggest names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.
Blankfein not only personally invested in the fund, but also allowed his association with it to be used in the fund’s marketing by letting let Eaglevale to use his name in marketing the flagship fund. Ironically this is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Goldman paid to Marc's mother-in-law, best known as Hillary Clinton. One almost wonders whose "benefits" Goldman was seeking to get out of this particular relationship.
By 2013, Institutional Investor proclaimed Mezvinsky "a hedge fund rising star,” alas
he was anything but, and instead of having a real grasp of macroeconomic events, or “how to hedge,” he decided to dump millions in Greece just before the country entered a death spiral that culminated with its third bailout, capital controls, insolvent banks and a terminally crippled economy.
Things of course went from terrible to abysmal for both the clueless hedge fund manager and his LPs, and in 2014 Hillary Clinton's son-in-law in a letter to the investors fessed-up to have been “incorrect” on Greece, generating staggering losses for the firm’s main Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity fund, a/k/a the "Greek recovery" fund.
By ‘incorrect,’ Mr. Chelsea Clinton meant the $25 million Eaglevale Greek fund had lost a stunning 48% and he ultimately had shut down the Greece-focused fund, after losing nearly 90% of its value backing Greece Recovery.
http://www.nytimes.com/…/clinton-son-in-laws-firm-is-said-t…
It is not at all clear why Eaglevale waited until this year (2016) to close the Hellenic fund, which already had lost about 40% of its value by early 2015! Perhaps it was just hope that the Greek people would simply pick up and rebuild the devastated economy from scratch, ideally without getting paid, thereby miraculously rescuing his investment.
There has been minimal reporting on the Goldman sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein investment in Eaglevale Partners, which is a private fund that faces few disclosure requirements. Hillary Clinton repeatedly dodged to answer if she knew the amount that Blankfein invested in her son-in-law’s fund.
The decision for Blankfein to invest in Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law’s company is just one of many ways Goldman Sachs has used its wealth to forge a tight bond with the Clinton family. The company paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 in personal speaking fees, paid Bill Clinton $1,550,000 in personal speaking fees, and donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. At a time when Goldman Sachs directly lobbied Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the company routinely partnered with the Clinton Foundation for events, even convening a donor meeting for the foundation at the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Manhattan.
http://www.cnn.com/…/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-paid-spe…/
To understand the significance of these dealings/connections between Goldman CEO, his investment in Clinton’s son-in-law equity firm and Clinton Foundation, we have to bring together two strands of history. One concerns Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long-running connections to Goldman, among their closest with any US corporation. The second concerns Goldman’s activities leading up to and during the Wall Street crash of 2007–2008, including its deceptive marketing of contaminated mortgage derivatives.
It suffices to say that the long-running ties with Goldman have paid off for the Clintons. According to a July 2014 analysis in the Wall Street Journal, from 1992 to the present Goldman has been the Clintons’ #1 Wall Street contributor, based on speaking fees, charitable donations, and campaign contributions. As early as 2000, Goldman was the 2nd most generous funder—after Citigroup—of Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, with a contribution of $711,000.
By the winter of 2006–2007, however, Goldman and its CEO Lloyd Blankfein were becoming deeply involved in the collapsing housing bubble—and engaging in the practices that have since resulted in years of investigations and lawsuits.
Data gathered mostly from the Corporate Research Project, a public interest website, show that on thirteen occasions between 2009 and 2016, Goldman was penalized by US courts or government agencies for fraudulent or deceptive practices that were committed mostly between 2006 and 2009. Four of these penalties amounted to $300 million or more.
In July 2010 the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Goldman $550 million for the fraudulent marketing.
In July 2012 Goldman agreed to pay $25.6 million to settle a suit brought by the Public Employees Retirement System of Mississippi accusing the bank of defrauding investors in a 2006.
In January 2013, the Federal Reserve announced that Goldman would pay $330 million to settle allegations of foreclosure abuse by its mortgage loan servicing operations. Finally, in January of this year, Goldman announced that it would pay $5 billion to settle multiple lawsuits brought by official agencies against the bank, mainly for fraudulent marketing of CDOs; the final terms of the settlement were released on April 11.
How have the Clintons responded to these revelations about Goldman Sachs, and their legal repercussions for the bank?
Since we do not have the transcripts of Clinton’s 2013 speeches, it is impossible fully to answer this question. But we do know that Clinton received $675,000 from the bank for the speeches and all indications are that the Clinton-Goldman connections continued much as they had before the crash.
Eyewitness accounts of Hillary Clinton’s 2013 Goldman speeches give some idea of their tone. One Goldman executive told Politico in early February that Clinton sounded “like a Goldman Sachs managing director,” while a report in The Wall Street Journal on February 11 quoted another unnamed source who said Clinton’s greetings toward her Goldman audiences “bordered on ‘gushy.’
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/…/clinton-speeches-218969
http://www.wsj.com/…/hillary-clintons-wall-street-talks-wer…
A third indication of Hillary Clinton’s recent approach to Goldman executives, however, is more substantial. This is a speech Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman executives, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein, on September 23, 2014, that is available on YouTube in which she held up Goldman as an outstanding corporate citizen.
Note that this unbridled support of Goldman Sachs happened just at the very time Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law Eaglevale Greek fund One had lost 90% of its values and Blankfein (Goldman CEO) who financially backed her son-in-laws firm personally lost a lot of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lKlJ3Ed4fQ
As the primary season reaches the crucial contests in the northeast and in California that will likely decide the ultimate victor, the dual history linking Goldman and the Clintons poses many questions that still need to be answered.
First, should Lloyd Blankfein remain CEO of Goldman Sachs in view of the bank’s central involvement in the deceptive marketing of securities during the crash?
Does cozy association between Goldman Sachs and Clintons in which both Clintons receiving inflated speaking fees from Goldman, and with Hillary Clinton performing what amounts to a high-end public relations effort for the bank, even as she styles herself as a reformer of the financial industry questionable?
As long as Clinton refuses to reveal the content of her Goldman speeches, as long as there is a grossly questionable triangle between Goldman Sachs, Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s Son-in-Law private equity firm whose financial backer is Goldman Sachs CEO, believing in Hillary Clinton’s campaign pledge to “rein in Wall Street” is utter naiveté if not an abject stupidity.
Susan Nevens - 7 June 2016
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