I imagine you've seen Goldman Sachs congratulating itself very loudly on its Half-Billion dollar "gift" to small businesses. Maybe that sounds like a lot. Let's throw some cold water on this cynical announcement:
- The money is spread out over a period of five years;
- A big chunk of it comes from a 'foundation' already in-place, so it's not all new money
- It represents, on an annualized basis, one typical day of their trading profits (and I think we can all agree that these profits seem to be, shall we say, virtually guaranteed; as with Madoff, the performance reported is statistically impossible, but they're running the show).
- An unstated portion of this "gift" is in the form of loans. Loans that have to be paid back.
- In relative terms, the gift (shown relative to just the bonus pool, below, and represented by that razor-thin blue slice) is similar to you or I giving a few dollars to a homeless person (actually, our act would be more generous, since we wouldn't demand the money back later).
Unless you are utterly naive, you know that the culture of GS isn't exactly known for its generosity. This is just a ploy to try to scrub away some of their sin. It will be interesting to see if the public is blinkered enough to actually accept this devilish ruse.
