Transcript of Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Speech Released-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
The transcript of a speech that Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs in 2013 has supposedly been released.
The Truth:
Hillary Clinton hasn’t released a transcript of her 2013 Goldman Sachs speech, and no credible sources have leaked the transcript, either.
Copies of the so-called Hillary Clinton Goldman Sachs transcript began making the rounds in mid-February 2016 when a number of fake news websites published a satirical “transcript” of Clinton’s speech. The so-called transcript appeared at BSNEWS, Counter Punch and Dissident Voice, among other websites and discussion forums:
It’s fair to say that you have transformed the solid, clunky, friction-laiden trading of traditional commodity speculation into responsive, intelligent, liquid flows, that have vaporized every barrier and turned into an expansive, responsive, endlessly expanding gas that fills every atom of our productive economic space which generates immeasurable value everywhere it goes, and everything it touches. Who cares that it’s a little chaotic or “unethical”? That it seems tied to every financial scandal and crisis in history? Not me. Some will say that you are simply parasitic on those who labor at menial physical production—these are people who still subscribe to 18 Century notions of value production–and that you skim off profit without doing anything meaningful or of value. Those people are misguided: we know that if money never sleeps, that’s because you keep it awake! You have—if I may use a metaphor–injected money with intelligence, with caffeine, Adderal, crack, meth, with LSD so that it can dance the crazy dance and grow a crazy thousand psychedelic feet tall in a rainbow minute! Money was a lazy b*tch, until you put it to work! And look how it works! Look how it grows! Materializes out of nowhere!
(Waves check again, dances, cackles).
Some people have said that it was irresponsible financial engineering, risk-taking, and profit-seeking, that led to the 2008 crash; that you shorted your own toxic mortgages in the most brazen securities fraud in financial history dynamiting the global economy; and that the exorbitant bonuses paid, the financial bailouts, the non-prosecutions created moral hazard, rewarded avarice, incompetence, corruption and vice. You and I know it is nothing of the sort. As leaders, innovators, captains of finance, you will always be subject of the jealous resentment, the petty tantrums of the unwashed masses, the insolvent, the irresponsible, the invidious, the losers. They will envy you, they will despise you, and they secretly want to be like you!
Counter Punch added a “Satire Alert” to indicate that the post was not an actual transcript of Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speech, but rather a political parody that aimed to entertain, not inform, its readers. Other sites didn’t add the disclaimer, however, which led to widespread confrusion about whether the transcript was real or not.
Hillary Clinton was reportedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech to Goldman Sachs in 2013. She’s faced questions about the speech indicating a “close” relationship with Wall Street investment banks throughout her presidential campaign, and she has resisted calls to release a transcript of the speech.
During a televised town hall, Hillary Clinton said she would be “happy to release anything I have whenever everybody else does the same, because everybody in this race, including Sen. Sanders, has given speeches to private groups.” On other instances, Clinton said that she would “look into” releasing transcripts, but she hasn’t done so.
Politico reported that Clinton was paid $225,000 for her Goldman Sachs appearances, and that Goldman staffers remember her praising the diversity of Goldman’s workforce, and downplaying the bank’s role in the 2008 financial crisis:
“It was pretty glowing about us,” one person who watched the event said. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”
At another speech to Goldman and its big asset management clients in New York in 2013, Clinton spoke about how it wasn’t just the banks that caused the financial crisis and that it was worth looking at the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to see what was working and what wasn’t.
“It was mostly basic stuff, small talk, chit-chat,” one person who attended that speech said. “But in this environment, it could be made to look really bad.”
But Hillary Clinton’s staffers dismissed those recollections as “pure trolling” and didn’t provide any further details about the speeches.