Reports the Guardian:

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses if, as predicted, it completed its most profitable year ever. Figures next month detailing the firm's second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.

Further, the piece cites "experts" who say that Goldman's bonus-slinging ways is a big "F You!" to those trying to regulate a corrupt financial system. You don't say?!

Vince Cable, the (UK) Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said: "The investment banks more than any other institutions created the culture of excessive leverage, excessive risk and excessive bonuses that led to the downfall of the financial system. Now they are cashing in and the same bonus culture has returned. The result must be that we are being pushed to the edge of another crash."

This proves once and for all that Goldman Sachs is in fact running the United States government. Thank you Hank Paulson, Neel Kashkari et al for setting up the circumstances that have fully illuminated this fact. We're sort of pissed about this but, at the same time, feel liberated by you guys finally affirming who our true masters are. So yeah, thanks a lot a-holes.

The only bright spot in all of this is that Matt Taibbi is going to be so pissed about it, and we kind of like it when Taibbi is pissed off about something.

Goldman To Make Record Bonus Payout [Guardian]

Neel, a bald preppy jerk with a couple years of experience as a Goldman I-banker, was Hank Paulson's choice to head the bailout operations because... well, no one is sure, even now. But he worked very, very hard, we are told (he slept in his office!), and we all felt so bad for him when congress yelled at him. Well, Friday is his last day at Treasury. And he'd like you to know that everyone who yelled at him for not keeping any sort of track of what what actually happenening to the goddamn money he handed out like Halloween candy or even deigning to explain the rationale behind any of his actions secretly thought he is a hero! Even Dennis Kucinich, who yelled at him for four hours.

"Don't take it personally," Kucinich (D-Ohio) told Kashkari behind closed doors after grilling him during a separate marathon session on Capitol Hill, according to people who were present. "I think you're doing a great job."

Dennis is a really nice guy, so we don't necessarily doubt this happened, but the thing is Neel was not doing a great job. But hey, look who else is proud of Neel!

"I deeply admire the guy," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview. "I think he's a person of integrity. He's creative, pragmatic and gets stuff done. I think he's an A-plus public servant."

We are all so proud of him for doing an incredibly tough job not very well. Go away.

A tipster at the ceremony snapped a photo of Kashkari, the Treasury's assistant secretary for financial stability, waiting to deliver a speech at Western Reserve Academy. He graduated from the private school in Husdon, Ohio, in 1991, where classmates remembered him as an "egocentric jerk" who featured a Ferrari on his high school yearbook page.

He returned today to his alma mater to explain how being a failure is awesome. For example, the first time he tried to leave Goldman Sachs and get a government job, he got nixed!

Kashkari was trying to get into a prestigious White House Fellowship program for mid-career people. As part of the process, his boss at Goldman Sachs got him a letter of recommendation from the company's then-Chief Executive Officer Henry Paulson.

But Kashkari got rejected from the program halfway through the process.

Then Paulson became Treasury Secretary and got Kashkari a job. Nice how that works! Unfortunately, Republican-appointed, Ferrari-loving, wind-energy-hating Goldman Sachs alumni aren't exactly popular with the Obama kids.

Kashkari back in his Western Reserve days:

A background on the science: Men typically have longer ring fingers than index fingers, while women's fingers are even. But excess testosterone in utero has been found to lengthen ring fingers (and turn women lesbian). The ring-finger characteristic, in turn, has been linked to traits like success in hypercompetitive fields like Wall Street and professional sports. As you study the finger length of Washington's moneymen, new and old, the question to ask: Having gotten into this mess by people taking outsized risks, do we really want a bunch of damn-the-torpedoes macho men fixing it?

The old team:

Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's ring finger is freakishly long, which could explain his impulsive behavior with the government's bailout money.

Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke's ring finger is cocked here, but extended, he seems to fit the profile.

Neel Kashkari, the Ferrari-loving head of the Treasury bailout program, has a relatively normal hand.

The new team:
President-elect Barack Obama's index finger is almost as long as his ring finger, which fits with his reputation as a cool cat, but not his reputation as a studmuffin.

Paulson's replacement at Treasury, Tim Geithner, is an eerie match for his spidery fingers.

As Harvard's president, Obama economic advisor Larry Summers got in trouble for suggesting women were no good at science. But did his critics take into consideration his womanly hands?

The villain:
Called to account for the collapse of his firm, Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld could invoke a novel defense: With that stubby ring finger, how could he possibly be a wild and crazy type who'd risk his entire company on bad mortgage-bond bets?

The Post says reporters and finance people alike were pissed yesterday because he only answered two or three questions, and those with "a tone of impatience." And how do you expect to excite the markets with a speech like this?:

On Friday, November 7 we published a new notice for financial agents to serve as asset managers for the equity, warrants and senior debt issued to the Treasury by financial institutions participating in the CPP. This solicitation is open to all entities that meet minimum qualifications and responses are due within six days on Thursday, November 13 at 5pm.

What you need are some public speaking tips, Neel. Pay attention:

1. Maintain eye contact. (Should not be a problem for you.)

2. Smile! (May in fact be a problem for you.)

3. Lay out a plan that will stabilize our financial institutions and energize our credit markets without unduly rewarding the leadership of banks and other lenders who plunged recklessly into risky loans, while turning a long-term profit for the taxpayer.

Good luck!

I have dedicated my life to this football team
And I will do anything to help it win.
- Bernie Kosar

You know it baby! Bring back Rush, Neel! The salvation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average depends on it!

[Top pic by commenter ineffable.me]

SOME OF NEEL KASHKARI'S FAVORITE QUOTES:

A modern day warrior
Mean mean stride
Today's Tom Sawyer
Mean mean pride.

- Rush

She was a hit machine
She kept her motor clean
She was the best darn woman that I ever seen.

- AC/DC

I have dedicated my life to this football team
And I will do anything to help it win.

- Bernie Kosar

Iraq will not be allowed to annex Kuwait.
That's not a threat. That's not a boast.
That's just the way it's going to be.

-President George Bush

All the world's indeed a stage
And we are merely players...

-"Rush/ Shakespeare"

A tipster writes:

I taught and coached at Western Reserve Academy during Neel's high school years. Although I never taught him, I recall him fairly well, and would sum him up by noting a handful of prior impressions of him: his teachers, while praising his diligence and ambition, mostly thought he was a dick. So did all the cool kids—and by this I mean the smart, interesting, mature kids that teachers normally come to like and enjoy. He was almost universally regarded as exactly the sort of hyper-ambitious, above-average-but-not-remarkable, over-confident right-wing jerk who thought much more highly of his own ability than did his teachers and other adults in the school community. And 2 specific memories stand out: for his senior page he chose a picture of himself in full preppy regalia, reclining on a Ferrari. (This was exactly the sort of picture that really worldly kids from highly cultivated families, even those with a Ferrari in the garage, would never be caught dead in. But Neel was clueless about how tacky & laughable this image was.)

The other memory was by far the most telling. We had all-school meetings most weekday mornings in the school's chapel, where the morning's announcements concerning school events, athletic contests, club meetings, and the like would be announced to the school body. Any student could get "on the list" to make an announcement by simply telling the headmaster or assistant headmaster that they had an announcement to make. So, on the morning that the first Gulf War began—or the first weekday morning afterward, anyway—the school was rather somber on the subject, and it wasn't mentioned at all at morning meeting. (Most faculty, like me, were very disturbed that we were at war—something we'd hoped not to see again in our lifetimes—and most students were a bit confused and unsure what to make of all the news.) Not, that is, until Neel was called upon by the assistant headmaster to give his announcement. Neel leapt to his feet and, with much fanfare and bombast, announced bouyantly that the US forces had engaged the Iraqi army in Kuwait and Iraq and were on their way to Baghdad! I can not emphasize enough how gleeful and excited his announcement was; I recall that he waved his arms in a kind of bravura flourish, obviously expecting everyone to burst into cheers around him—and no one did. Everyone remained utterly silent, and he looked very foolish, the lone exultant warmonger in a room full of somber faces. As we walked to classes afterward, several colleagues and I briefly discussed what an absurd moment that had been, and what an ass Neel had made of himself...

I think it somewhat problematic to nail an adult for his behavior as a teenager, although in Neel's case, and given the anecdote about him that you published on your website, it sounds like nothing has changed. He was memorably an egocentric jerk.

[Suffice it to say we are hot on the trail of this Ferrari photo. Anyone with further info on Neel can email us.]

Among other things, he has focused on working with American banks toward adoption of a less-risky system of mortgage-based bonds that is popular in Europe. And he moved to a larger office, with room for sofas and photos of his favorite ski slopes around Lake Tahoe.

Telling!

Mr. Kashkari, who grew up near Akron, Ohio, is a first-generation Indian-American. His parents had grown up in poverty in the Kashmir region of India before becoming an engineer and a doctor and coming to the United States.

Revealing!

In graduate school, he designed a solar-powered car that was driven across the country.

Superfluous!

"I'm a free-market Republican."—Kashkari, at an American Enterprise Institute conference, Sept. 19, 2008

Unnerving!

He worked at Goldman Sachs, in San Francisco, before joining the government, advising security-software companies on mergers and acquisitions — and he still has a house here. Prior to getting his MBA — Wharton, not Stanford, alas — he worked as an aerospace engineer at TRW on Nasa missions, and got a bachelor's and master's at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's alma mater.

• "The ex-Goldman Sachs vice president lives in the pleasant Washington, DC suburb with wife, Minal, 32, and their enormous brown shaggy Newfoundland dog, Winslow - named after former Browns star tight end Kellen Winslow."
• "His high school yearbook is filled with quotes he chose from rock bands like AC/DC and Rush."
• "Kashkari is a 1991 graduate of Western Reserve Academy, a private college prep boarding and day school."
• "Prior to his career in finance, Mr. Kashkari was a R&D Principal Investigator at TRW in Redondo Beach, California where he developed technology for NASA space science missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope."
• An anonymous and totally unsubstantiated HuffPo commenter says he's a right-wing woman-hater! "This person and I have a mutual friend. We were at an event last year. A few of us sat outside that evening, to chat. My Significant Other and I joined him, his wife, and another couple. Oddly, they were at 2 tables, segregated by gender. The women talked weather. The guys talked politics.
  Kashkari starts dogging Hillary Clinton. He said "I'd never vote for her because I don't think women should be president." Verbatim. My SO told me this, and I heard part of it, as I was sitting nearby. The other women were oblivious.
  My SO defended women, but Kashkari wouldn't have it. He insisted women should never be leaders. Kashkari's own SO said earlier, that although she had a career, "I basically follow Neel around wherever he goes." Verbatim.
  Kaskhari then said global warming doesnt' exist. He said wind energy is stupid. And he would look up things on his Blackberry whenever my SO said something, to prove him wrong.
  Because he didn't like non GOPs, he later went to our mutual friend and said my SO had talked about being abducted by aliens. Yes, Neel Kashkari said this, in an attempt to attack someone he disagreed with."

And that's just about everything that the entire media has been able to come up with! Email us if you know more about Mr. Kashkari. I sure hope he's good with money things.