No Need to Worry About Goldman Sachs During the Pandemic

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You may have lost your job thanks to COVID-19. Or maybe you’ve drained your savings. That’s a shame, but I have some good news to take the sting out of your misfortune: Wall Street is still doing fine. Goldman Sachs earned nearly $4 billion in its most recent quarter:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s third-quarter profit nearly doubled, the latest confirmation that, even in a pandemic and a recession, Wall Street can still make money….Worries that the coronavirus would rival 2008 as a threat to the U.S. financial system have subsided for now. Banks’ trading fees have surged. Bond investors’ appetite has allowed companies that borrowed billions from banks in emergency loans this spring to pay them back. Big corporate bankruptcies have leveled off.

….Goldman has had a relatively easy crisis so far. Efforts by the Federal Reserve to support markets have allowed the firm to move loans off its books and reap fees by buying and selling securities.

In fairness to the Fed, they may have helped Goldman but they’ve also tried to help the rest of us by appealing to Congress to pass a coronavirus aid/stimulus package. Congress hasn’t done it yet, but that’s only because Republican dedication to screwing the working class outweighs even its own sense of self-preservation.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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