Bonuses on Wall Street are yet again in the headlines. And Two things just appeared in the news about Goldman Sachs:

1. They’re predicting an enormous profit this year, surpassing the last good year anyone else had, namely 2007; and the bonuses they plan to pay break records, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post. The entire recession, it appears, was a market adjustment which cleared out the bulk of their competition. The recession was great for them. They’ve also been permitted to repay their TARP loan. I’d like to know why Obama lets Treasury permit this.

I really want to know.

2. Goldman had a break-in, and called the Justice Department about it. An employee who had just departed for a better job with another company, Sergey Aleynikov stole some ultra-secret software from Goldman Sachs that “could be used to manipulate markets.” 

So somebody with talent hates Goldman. And did something about it. He uploaded the program to an encrypted, shared server.  This immediately calls to mind the newsgroups, and all the old beta testers of Microsoft software who leaked copies of everything out to the public. Why do they do it? Because they don’t like the company. It’s their version of rebellion, and it’s the most effective kind around.

I secretly — sweatily — swarthily tip my hat to this guy. We are already convinced that Goldman has been manipulating the markets for many years, and caused incalculable harm. A recently dispossessed person, someone who’s lost his or her job or home or both — looking at this issue from a stance in the financial gutter — may feel perhaps it’s only just if the rest of the world got to use this software. But of course, now it’s been removed.

Note: Sergey Aleynikov may have accomplished the theft using an ultradog, since Russians are known for owning them. Here is a picture of Putin’s ultradog, an amazing animal.

Putin's ultradog.