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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

"Marginal value for society"? Good thing they're not getting paid by society then. If you're not a shareholder, I don't think you get to complain that other people are giving these people money.

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Not that up with US stuff, but didn't GS get money from the government during the AIG bailout? If so, doesn't that give every one in the US complaining rights?

Yeah I guess :) But GS paid the money back now, I'm not sure how much preferred stock the USA still owns in GS.

The government robbed us, gave it to GS, and then GS pays the government back and the government blows up brown people.

What a win for the U.S. tax payer!

They paid TARP back but not the AIG backdoor bailout, iirc. That's the reason for the continuing brouhaha over AIG - Goldman (and other AIG counterparties) got 100% of what they had at risk with AIG, no haircut, all via the US govt bailout, and didn't pay it back (b/c it wasn't paid directly to them in the first place, hence 'backdoor' bailout).

Their profits have to come from somewhere, and a lot of those profits come from their trading activity in the markets, and for them to extract money from that, then the other participants in that market (myself, and "society") have to be losing it.

Do you think it might be possible that moving that money between market participants is actually a good thing? Let's say someone decides to put 10% of their fortune into a hedge fund and the fund goes to zero. Is that worse than just giving 10% of your money to the church? The children of the limo drivers, pilots, fund administrators, sales desk people, all deserve to eat (in my opinion).

This is not a frivolous reply.

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