Goldman’s Lies and Jamie Dimon’s Piggy Bank

After a drawn out battle to liberate the records of the Fed’s discount window lending, they’ve finally been released. Bloomberg (who led the legal fight to liberate them) has made the records available here.

While it’s going to take a while for those who understand this stuff to collate the data–the Fed released individual PDFs–thus far there are two stories. First, when Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn testified to the FCIC that Goldman had only accessed the window once–and that at the request of the Fed–he appears to have not been telling the truth.

Goldman Sachs Bank USA, a unit of the company, took overnight loans from the Federal Reserve on Sept. 23, Oct. 1, and Oct. 23 in 2008 as well as on Sept. 9, 2009, and Jan. 11, 2010, according to the data released today. The largest loan was $50 million on Sept. 23 and the smallest was $1 million on the most recent two occasions.

Goldman Sachs President and Chief Operating Officer Gary D. Cohn told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission June 30 that “we used it one night at the request of the Fed to make sure our systems were linked with their systems, and it was for a de minimis amount of money.” Peter J. Wallison, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, then asked, “you never had to use it after that?”

“No, and as I said, we used it on the Fed’s request,” Cohn replied.

Maybe now that we’ve established the principle that people should go to jail for lying like this, we can finally send a bankster to jail?

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, observes that Jamie Dimon was serving on the Board of the NY Fed at the same time as sucking at its teat.

Under court order, the Federal Reserve today identified more banks that took loans during the financial crisis using a once-secret system that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called “welfare for the rich and powerful.”A Sanders provision in the Wall Street reform law already had forced the Fed last Dec. 1 to name banks that took trillions of dollars in emergency loans during the crisis.

“The Federal Reserve bailout was welfare for the rich and powerful and you-are-on-your-own rugged individualism for everyone else,” Sanders said. “The information released by the Fed today should never have been kept secret.  This money does not belong to the Federal Reserve; it belongs to the American people.  I applaud Bloomberg News, Fox News and others for their success in lifting another veil of secrecy at the Fed.”

Sanders said the latest disclosure raises questions about conflicts of interest. While Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, served on the board of directors of the New York Fed, in one month alone, April of 2008, JPMorgan Chase received a combined $313 billion in Fed loans.

“This is an obvious conflict of interest on its face that must be investigated as part of the independent audit that my amendment requires to be completed this summer.  When JPMorgan Chase was telling the world about their great financial success, it seems like they were using the Fed’s discount window as a giant piggy bank.”

I guess this is the kind of information about the banksters about which we little people are supposed to remain ignorant?

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  1. msobel says:

    You silly person.

    “Maybe now that we’ve established the principle that people should go to jail for lying like this, we can finally send a bankster to jail? ”

    What case law (which has passed review by the Roberts court) allows a TBTF Bankster to go to jail for a felony ?

    • mzchief says:

      Examine the PDFs to see if you could use your flatbed scanner to go from PDF (image) to text via the character recognition program as they are very good these days. If so, then have a human do a visual inspection and compare to validate the image to text conversion. If they were really naughty as to the doc quality provided, then it’s still a flatbed scanner and a human but many, many more hours per doc including the image -> text conversion validation.

  2. mzchief says:

    How conveeeeeenient.

    Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, observes that Jamie Dimon was serving on the Board of the NYT Fed at the same time as sucking at its teat.

    Hmmmm …

    James “Jamie” Dimon (born March 13, 1956) is the current CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co, and previously served as a Class A director of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, a three year term which started January 2007.[1][2] Dimon was named to Time Magazine′s 2006, 2008 and 2009 lists of the world’s 100 most influential people.

    (excerpt “Jamie Dimon“)

    Jamie Dimon says the story of 2011 will be America blossoming again. Two years after the financial meltdown, the chairman and CEO of one the top U.S. banks, JPMorgan Chase, (JPM) says businesses have plenty of capital and are starting to expand again. Dimon should know, sitting atop more than $2 trillion in assets and overseeing 230,000 employees.

    (excerpt “JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon sees good times in 2011” by Maria Bartiromo, Special for USA Today, Feb. 20, 2011)

    Agnotologic capitalism: war, counterfeiting, nuclear industry/nuclear accident, mining and how they tie together. Here, here and here.

    Silver (AG) is a precious ingredient consumed in the industrial process to create drones and other weapons.

    Therefore … Max Keiser: Crash JP Morgan – Buy Silver! and more.

  3. Kelly Canfield says:

    Huh. I wonder if I can whip up a macro to save the PDF as text, strip the headers and footers, and past into a master CSV file. With just some random file sampling they appear to have a very consistent format.

    Still a bear of a job trying to turn this into a searchable database.

    • Kelly Canfield says:

      You know what has pissed me of for a long time now? The matter of the WH visitor logs.

      Yes, they do publish them every quarter. I’m obsessive about downloading them. But you know what? The 3rd month of the Quarter for POTUS visitors is always held back until the next quarterly publication.

      You can verify for yourself. The Quarter ends today. Soon, they’ll publish the WH logs. See for yourself at what date that POTUS records stop.

  4. Kelly Canfield says:

    Good dawg – this release couldn’t be more unfriendly. The emails are a mess.

    You know what they did (in just my wild assed opinion)?

    * They have all this data in perfectly tabular form, both the maturity/portfolio data, and the origination data. They put it into MS Access.

    * For the emails they download from SharePoint and make into an MS Access database. That’s about a 4 click operation once one has gathered the emails one is releasing into one folder for export.

    * In each Access database they redact what they don’t want released (N/R)

    * For each database release, they made an MC Access report exported to these PDFs in the most ridiculous way possible.

    The naming convention on the emails is simply ridiculous – Doc1, Doc2 etc.

    This has about pissed me off enough to re-jigger it all back into Access, so I could spit out one Excel file for the loans, and subtotal the MF’ing amounts by borrower and how long they held the monies.

    Marcy, what are the “Category” designations in the file folders; do you know? Are they specific FOIA categories responded to, and would you need those as a column in an Excel sheet? I assume you would want a folder/filename in a column so you could quickly go to the original released document for verification.

    Just let me know. This is irritating me beyond belief.

      • Kelly Canfield says:

        Will do. I’ll hit you and Marcy’s email with the results, but it’s taking some time. It’ll probably speed up, as one usually finds ways to shorten work, but sheesh.

        And I’m not doing the email section. Just random sample file selection yielded highly redacted emails; not fruitful for my purposes/interests, so I’m just sticking with the loan windows.

        The pisser is the maturity date; they’re all lumped under “how many days” so that I can’t just make a macro to copy the juicy bits in the tables.

  5. EternalVigilance says:

    Maybe now that we’ve established the principle that people should go to jail for lying like this, we can finally send a bankster to jail?

    Law, which is merely disembodied violence, exists simply as another way for the powerful to control those less so.

    As such it makes as much sense to talk about bankers going to jail for violating a law as it does to talk about a butcher going to jail for leaving the confines of the animal pen.

    • liberaldem says:

      I’m thinking Quantico, and suggesting that they all be forced to remain naked in full view of the guards, 24/7.

  6. hackworth1 says:

    it was for a de minimis amount of money..

    Hey! It was for da minimum when I drove up to the Fed Window. And dey made me do it! What’s a few billion between friends?

  7. Jim says:

    Obama is surrounded by Bankers and CEO’s. He killed the Alberto Gonzales investigation and refused to go after war criminals, why does anyone think bankers will be held accountable? Dodd-Frank is a joke, banks can and will do whatever they want until the next crash. And there will be no way to save the economy next time. The Fed and the taxpayers are out of money.

  8. rmacdonald says:

    Send a bankster to jail??? Thanks for the laugh, I really needed a good knee slapper tonight. I suppose someone will come up with the idea Obama is a progressive next!

  9. TSop says:

    Is there a drug testing facet to this welfare for the rich? You know Jamie Dimon is snorting some serious shit off of Maria Bartiromo’s tits….

  10. bailey2739 says:

    Ebair’s got a point. What about the $3.2 Billion lent to the Arab Banking Corp., 59% controlled by Libya’s Central Bank? I guess Obama relly blew this one. All he had to do was classify the Fed records “secret” and that would’ve been the end of it.

  11. ralphbon says:

    I have no doubt that one or more commercial data-mining companies, working on contract for Goldman et al. or their law firms, have already sorted and analyzed this material and are preparing initial reports. These companies have sophisticated proprietary algorithms that they use, for example, when a corporation’s hard drives have been subpoenaed and terabytes of documents, emails, and spreadsheets need to be scoured for evidence.

    Crisis management dictates that vulnerabilities be identified and responses preemptively assembled while the bloggers and news organizations are still pulling their boots on.

  12. revolutionary1 says:

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