The Wikileaks leaks

A handful anyway - not quite getting the media coverage they would if the Trump tape hadn't emerged.

- WikiLeaks hack reveals cozy relationship between Clinton campaign, super PAC.

A top attorney for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign sent a memo to campaign aides teaching them how to legally communicate with a pro-Clinton super PAC, emails released Monday by WikiLeaks show.

While Clinton has claimed her campaign has nothing to do with the super PAC Priorities USA, a leaked email from the personal account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, suggests differently.

In the email, Clinton attorney Marc Elias outlined what is basically a strategy for steering large campaign donors to the super PAC without breaking the law.

- Hillary Clinton transcripts: WikiLeaks posts apparent excerpts from private Wall Street speeches.

Wikileaks has dumped thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, which includes apparent excerpts from Ms Clinton’s paid, closed-door speeches to Wall Street executives after leaving her position as Secretary of State.

In the excerpts, flagged in a 25 January email, Ms Clinton apparently suggested that Wall Street insiders were best qualified to regulate the banking industry and also included her apparent admission of the need for money from banking executives for political fundraising.

The group posted more than 2,000 emails on Friday evening, claiming they came from an email account belonging to Mr Podesta. Wikileaks promised to continue publishing emails from a trove of more than 50,000 emails obtained from a hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) this year.

- Search the emails yourself here.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Sues Goldman-Sachs

The company is accused of packaging mortgage bonds they thought were likely to fail into a single portfolio, selling it to investors, and then betting against the portfolio. When the housing market collapsed, the investors lost money, but the company did very very well.

This is fraud.

More from the Huffington Post. They end their story by wondering whether the SEC will in fact punish the company. The agency looked the other way while it was going on, might it still? Has the SEC been captured by the financial industry?

For more info: Financial Regulatory Reform.

Goldman Sachs Works on its Image

Story here. And a link to the firm it hired to help it out here. You can follow them on Twitter!

For 2301s: think both free press and public opinion.

The Treasury Department and Goldman-Sachs Continued

The latest in an ongoing story, from Bloomberg:

Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street firms, according to financial disclosure forms.

....

As part of Geithner’s kitchen cabinet, Sperling and Sachs wield influence behind the scenes at the Treasury Department, where they help oversee the $700 billion banking rescue and craft executive pay rules and the revamp of financial regulations. Yet they haven’t faced the public scrutiny given to Senate-confirmed appointees, nor are they compelled to testify in Congress to defend or explain the Treasury’s policies.

“These people are incredibly smart, they’re incredibly talented and they bring knowledge,” said Bill Brown, a visiting professor at Duke University School of Law and former managing director at Morgan Stanley. “The risk is they will further exacerbate the problem of our regulators identifying with Wall Street.”

The Holy Trinity: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan

Frank Rich argues that little has been done to reform the financial system which continues to enjoy the fruits of the bailout:

The first stab at corrective legislation emerging from Barney Frank’s Financial Services Committee in the House is porous. While unregulated derivatives remain the biggest potential systemic threat to the world’s economy, Frank said that “the great majority” of businesses that use derivatives would not be covered under his committee’s much-amended bill. It’s also an open question whether the administration’s proposed consumer agency to protect Americans from mortgage and credit-card outrages will survive the banking lobby’s attempts to eviscerate it. As that bill stands now, more than 98 percent of America’s banks — mainly community banks, representing 20 percent of deposits — would be shielded from the new agency’s supervision.

If it’s too early to pronounce these embryonic efforts at financial reform a failure, it’s hard to muster great hope. As the economics commentator Jeff Madrick points out in The New York Review of Books, the American public is still owed “a clear account of the financial events of the last two years and of who, if anyone, is seriously to blame.” Without that, there will be neither the comprehensive policy framework nor the political will to change anything.

The only investigation in town is a bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress in May. It is still hiring staff. Its 10 members are dispersed throughout the country, and, according to a spokeswoman, have contemplated only a half-dozen public sessions over the next year. Such a panel, led by the former California state treasurer Phil Angelides, seems highly unlikely to match Congress’s Depression-era Pecora commission. That investigation was driven by a prosecutor whose relentless fact-finding riveted the country and gave birth to the Securities and Exchange Commission, among other New Deal reforms. Last week, we learned that the current S.E.C. has hired a former Goldman hand as the chief operating officer of its enforcement unit.

As with similar reform efforts, the collective strength of the affected interests make the efforts difficult. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan may be the tail that wags the dog. This fits comfortably with our discussion of agency capture and iron triangles.

Bad Stuff About Goldman-Sachs

Here's a great, and damning, piece about the influence of Goldman-Sachs. The author sees them fueling and profiting from every bubble of the past seven decades.