IF YOU'RE NOT DOING AS WELL AS GOLDMAN SACHS IT MAY BE BECAUSE HENRY PAULSON AND ROBERT RUBIN NEVER WORKED FOR YOU

Daily Beast - Goldman Sachs is nearing record numbers for bonuses, trading profits—and its influence in the banking world. But there's something ominous about the giddy trading figures. What a difference a year, a pile of federal capital, fewer competitors, and rebounding trading profits make. Coming on the heels of JPM Chase's giddy profits Wednesday, Goldman Sachs' third quarter earnings fell shy of the record set last quarter, but earnings per share handily beat analysts' expectations of $4.24. . . All this comes four months after Goldman repaid the $10 billion of TARP money it received during the height of the crisis last fall, along with $426 million in dividends

Raw Story - Goldman Sachs will announce the firm's bonus payments for 2009. Analysts expect the bonus pool to mushroom to $23 billion -- double the bonus pool paid to employees in 2008. Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs said that it had put aside $11.4 billion for bonuses during the first half of the year. How much is $23,000,000,000? For one thing, it's enough to send 460,000 full paying students to Harvard University for one year, or 115,000 for four years.

It's enough to pay the health insurance premium for the average American family ($13,375) 1.7 million times.

It's enough to upgrade 191 million computers to Windows 7 operating system (priced at $119.99), or to buy 115 million iPhones at $199.99 (provided the recipient was willing to sign a two-year contract).

Or, apparently, it's enough to reward the employees of Goldman Sachs for a bonanza trading year, at a firm where average employee compensation was recently $622,000 -- and likely to be greater this year.

The $23 billion figure could leave some American taxpayers woozy -- the US government bailed out Goldman Sachs with a multi-billion payment last year, which the firm has since repaid.

But while Goldman is likely to pay its biggest bonuses ever to employees, the firm pays very little in taxes worldwide. In 2008, the company was said to have paid just $14 million in taxes worldwide, and paid $6 billion in 2007.

Financial Times - Obama administration officials now working on fixing and regulating the financial system were beneficiaries of several million dollars in pay from Wall Street and private equity companies, it has been revealed. Financial disclosure forms show that prior to joining the government, Gene Sperling, a senior Treasury adviser, was paid $887,727 by Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches to companies that included Stanford Group, the company run by Sir Allen Stanford, who has since been charged with fraud. Mr Sperling's compensation from Goldman was for work on a philanthropic project. His overall pay, including for his main job at the Council on Foreign Relations, totaled $2.2m in the 13 months to January.

The Nation - In March, months after the government gave an unprecedented $85 billion to AIG, the insurance giant released a list of counterparties, exposing some of the world's top financial institutions as the real recipients of the bailout. First among its peers, Goldman Sachs got a whopping $12.9 billion, despite having claimed in September to be insulated from AIG's troubles. Based on these revelations, Maryland Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings, who had dogged the financial industry since the crisis began, told his staff to prepare a letter calling for an investigation.

Two Congressional staffers familiar with the matter told The Nation that a draft was circulated to House members on March 23. Within hours, Cummings's office had received a phone call from a lobbying firm hired by Goldman Sachs, making an "insistent but polite" request for a meeting. Cummings, intending to send the letter regardless, granted the audience, and so it was that top Goldman executives like president Gary Cohen and CFO David Viniar arrived the next day. They brought someone else too, a big-name Democratic politician with serious populist credibility: Dick Gephardt.

While Gephardt spent most of his twenty-eight years in national Democratic politics quietly promoting and voting with establishment interests, he is best known for his friendship with labor and advocacy for universal healthcare during two presidential runs. In 2003 he harshly condemned corporate crime, which he said "ruined people's lives for selfishness and greed," and launched his candidacy claiming, "Every proposal I'm making, every idea I'm advancing has a single, central purpose: to revive a failing economy and give working Americans the help and security they need." So why, six years later, was he on Capitol Hill representing one of the biggest players in the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression?