David vs. Goliath^ 7.5

Goldman Sachs has assets of $933B. The Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union has assets of $30m.

This makes Goldman 31,000 times larger than Peoples Federal Credit.

Let’s assume David was 5 feet tall.

To keep the Goldman/People ratio the same as the Goliath/David ratio, Goliath would have to be 155,000 feet (29 miles) tall. Since in the book of Samuel, he was roughly nine feet tall, that means Goldman is Peoples^7.5

Now here’s the rest of the story:

The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn’t fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter – designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork…

Goldman Sachs had also joined up with the Peoples bank… giving the credit union $5,000 toward the little bank’s 25th anniversary celebration dinner. …

When a Goldman exec saw its gilded name next to Occupy Wall Street, the financial giant expressed much displeasure. In fact, my sources say, Goldman threatened legal action unless the credit union gave up the $5,000 and reprinted the invite sans the Sachs moniker….

But there’s a lot more at stake in this battle than a $5,000 donation gone wrong. Underneath, it’s a battle royal for control of tens of billions of dollars in government mandated “community reinvestment” funds.

In 2008, the US Treasury handed Goldman Sachs a check for $10bn from the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (Tarp)…Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson transformed investment bank Goldman into a commercial bank overnight….

But there was a catch: Goldman would have to return a chunk of the public’s billions in the form of loans for low-income customers and members of its “community”, as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Problem: Goldman has, it seems, no low-income customers, nor a “community”. Goldman was directed to find poor people and a community and hand over some cash.

So Goldman looked down from its riverfront tower in lower Manhattan and discovered Peoples….

For the big money-center banks, the CRA is good deal. They pay some blood money into community banks and offload their low-income customers. …

The billions of dollars in CRA funds (Citibank alone committed $115bn over ten years) have given community banks tremendous political authority at the local level….

Goldman has so far only passed out its legally-required CRA funds with an eye-dropper: the $5,000 for Peoples (now withdrawn), and a few other dabs here and there. The big cash investments from the Goldman fund are dangling, hoping to lure only those community banks and low-income funds that will dance to Goldman’s tune.
…
These Community Reinvestment funds ultimately come from public pockets, so why should the titans of Wall Street be allowed to bully community credit unions, which are answerable to their members, not Goldman’s partners?

With additional reporting by Arun Gupta, founding editor of the Occupied Wall Street Journal

Goldman Sachs is a political action committee and fixer/briber-extraordinaire, not a bank. And Peoples, which declined to cave into Goldman’s pressure, is a nest of angels.