It's nice that even as everything else in my life comes crashing around my ears....

.... I at least have achieved Festivids Draft. \o/!

Which is really comforting, because I was having visions of defaulting, which would have been very embarrassing, or having to give myself an extension and then trying to explain it, shamefaced, to Lithy.

It's Goldman's country, we just live here

Hank Paulson’s inside jobs

What on earth did Hank Paulson think his job was in the summer of 2008? As far as most of us were concerned, he was secretary of the US Treasury, answerable to the US people and to the president. But at the same time, in secret meetings, Paulson was hanging out with his old Goldman Sachs buddies, giving them invaluable information about what he was thinking in his new job.

The first news of this behavior came in October 2009, when Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that Paulson had met with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in a Moscow hotel suite for an hour at the end of June 2008. He told them his views of the US and global economies, he previewed a market-moving speech he was about to give, and he even talked about the possibility that Lehman Brothers might blow up. Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed do just that a few months later.

Today we learn that the Goldman meeting in Moscow was not some kind of aberration. A few weeks later, on July 28 2008, Paulson met with a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the headquarters of Eton Park Capital Management — a fund founded by former Goldman superstar Eric Mindich.

At that meeting, he gave out nonpublic information about the financial condition of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I just submitted a vid to a contest

Which actually is not usually my thing, but the theme this time around was irresistible - Vids to songs by Florence and the Machine. Hee!