by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
Goldman Sachs’ online bank, Marcus, is offering an interest rate on its savings accounts that is 350 times the interest rate being offered by its competitors, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. That’s not normal. Not normal at all. (Above screen shots were taken this morning. Chase and Bank of America screen shots come from BankRate; Marcus screen shot comes from Marcus.)
Marcus is the online banking platform offered by Goldman Sachs Bank USA – a federally-insured bank backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer. But what 99 percent of Americans don’t know about Goldman Sachs Bank USA is that it is the unit of Goldman Sachs that holds trillions of dollars in derivatives, including the kind of credit derivatives that blew up the U.S. economy in 2008 and would have taken down Goldman Sachs were it not for sneaky bailouts.
According to the most recent report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Goldman Sachs Bank USA has $513.9 billion in assets and $50.97 trillion in derivatives as of September 30, 2022. Yes, you read that correctly. (See Table 24 of the OCC report.) The most dangerous of the derivatives, credit derivatives, tally up to $623.6 billion, which is $110 billion more than the bank has in assets.
This might help to explain why Goldman Sachs is offering 350 times the going interest rate of its competitors to attract deposits and shore up its capital base.
Other noteworthy things are happening at Goldman Sachs. On January 9,…
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