Senator Bernie Sanders:

When the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street drove this country into the deepest recession since the 1930s, the largest financial institutions in the United States took every advantage of being American. They just loved their country - and the willingness of the American people to provide them with the largest bailout in world history. In 2008, Congress approved a $700 billion gift to Wall Street. Another $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans and other financial assistance came from the Federal Reserve. America. What a great country.

But just two years later, as soon as these giant financial institutions started making record-breaking profits again, they suddenly lost their love for their native country. At a time when the nation was suffering from a huge deficit, largely created by the recession that Wall Street caused, the major financial institutions did everything they could to avoid paying American taxes by establishing shell corporations in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They are not alone. In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.

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Janet and Jim Baker are fighting Goldman Sachs over its work in 2000 - or lack thereof - on the all-stock sale of their business, Dragon Systems, to a company that later collapsed, leaving them shut out.

NYT:

THE business deal from hell began to crumble even before the Champagne corks were popped.

The deal, the $580 million sale of a highflying technology company, Dragon Systems, had just been approved by its board and congratulations were being exchanged. But even then, at that moment of celebration, there was a sense that something was amiss.

The chief executive of Dragon had received a congratulatory bottle from the investment bankers representing the acquiring company, a Belgian competitor called Lernout & Hauspie. But he hadn’t heard from Dragon’s own bankers at Goldman Sachs.

“I still have not received anything from Goldman,” the executive wrote in an e-mail to the other bank. “Do they know something I should know?”

The Bakers paid Goldman Sacs $5 million to guide them through what should have been a fairly simple transaction, only to have their contract with them end up being worth even less than the now worthless $580 million in stock they received for a business that was their life's work. Now after more than a decade of fighting in court, Goldman is so far getting away with saying that they gave the Bakers “great advice” and "guided them to a completed transaction.”

Perhaps now that this story has been made public, even some of the wealthy people in America can understand what millions of "everyday" Americans have been going through while having their lives destroyed through mortgage fraud. Not that any Republican pols will give a rip, mind you...

Good-bye Wall Street: Cities like Jacksonville, Fla., and Salt Lake City are where the new finance jobs are these days. To save money, some of New York’s and London’s biggest investment houses are outsourcing jobs, not overseas but to smaller cities in the U.S. where lower salaries go further than they would in the expensive financial hubs. Even Goldman Sacs boasted about the cost savings of relocating within the US during a presentation to investors in May. It’s called “near-shoring” and it’s a trend, but not everyone is loving it. While it may make sense for businesses as a whole to shift their operations to less costly cities, uprooting to such places after building a life in New York is a tough sell for some longtime employees.