Hillary Clinton Gives Honest Speech To Goldman Sachs, Stuns Audience Into Silence

Warning: Satire! 

Credit: slate.com
Credit: slate.com

The following is a leaked transcript of Hillary Clinton’s first speech to Goldman Sachs delivered on 6/04/2013.   Two other speeches are also rumored to be in circulation awaiting publication. This is the full transcript. Secretary Clinton received $225,000 for this speech. The speech has not been confirmed or authenticated.
CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Lloyd [Blankfein], and thanks to everyone at Goldman Sachs for welcoming me today. I’m delighted to be back among friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, kindred spirits…
Let me jump right in. You know, over the past few months, there have been popular concerns about an economy that still isn’t delivering for the majority of Americans. It’s not “delivering” the way that they feel it should, that they feel entitled to. Most Americans that you speak to, speak a populist rhetoric that claims it is stacked for those at the top, that those of you here have it too good.
(Laughter)
But we know the hopes that the little people have for their future — things like school, job, food, clothing on their backs– all of those little things would not be possible without your leadership and innovation. Since the time of the Medicis, even before, and the financing of the first joint stock companies in the transatlantic slave trade, we know that finance and banking is what makes our capitalist economy not just grow but tick…
Previous generations of Americans built this economy and a middle class on a collective illusion: that they do productive work, this creates wealth, and that this builds the economy. We all know how misguided that is. We know that it’s really due to your investing, credit, and economic stewardship, that they have been able to work at all, that they are able to put food on their tables. It’s due to you and other banking, trading, investment houses that we have an economy that works at all. You are why we are a truly 21st century economic power.
(Applause)
You, Lloyd, and your colleagues, have been instrumental in that. People say you are overpaid or even parasitic, parasites on the economic body, and they quote a long line of seemingly “unethical behavior”. They equate with you everything that is wrong and immoral with Capitalism, they charge that you have acted ruthlessly and unethically, “rigging every major market bubble since the Great Depression”.
(Hissing)
But I—contrary to populist, hysterical demonizing–firmly believe that what you do is essential and critical: you help allocate our investment, direct our economic development, hedge risks, and create power, policies, and alliances in ways that make our country stronger, richer, more powerful, more innovative, competitive, and yes, more “democratic”. You underwrite our elections and our political process—taking on the huge cost of enabling democratic dialogue at its biggest, broadest capacity. Your tireless work adds true value, and without you, we would still be struggling helplessly against industrial powerhouses in Asia and across the world trying to compete with them on the level of industry, technology, innovation, and hard work, at which they would beat us hands down. It’s your financial innovation, your speculative tools, which allow us new ways of creating value without sweat or struggle, that gives us the competitive advantage. It’s this vision, this technological innovation, this financial wizardry, this is what makes America great and powerful.

(Applause)

For decades, people have argued that if we give more wealth to those at top by cutting taxes and letting you and other corporations write the own rules, it will trickle down, it will trickle down to everyone else. And it has! My speech here is an example!

(Cackles, Waves Check)  

(Laughter).

But seriously, I believe that the work of Goldman Sachs is critical for us, and without you, America would be a faint shadow of its current greatness. Your work in innovating finance, in creating new sources of wealth and investment, your tireless efforts stimulating the creation of new financial instruments, in lobbying politicians, in monopolizing the treasury and cabinet, in setting and binding the parameters of financial regulation that allows fluidity and flexibility in investment and speculation, this allows us to create wealth—almost out of thin air. It’s this alchemy, this genius, this Midas touch—which is one of the most under-appreciated and under-acknowledged contributions in modern economic history.

(Applause)

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 transformed into an expansive, responsive, endlessly expanding gas that fills every atom of our productive economic space that 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 and economic catastrophe in history? Not me. “Creative Destruction” is all part of the game, and you are masters of it.

(Applause)

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 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 your 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 and imploding the global economy; and that the exorbitant bonuses paid from tax payer money, 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, your successes, they will despise you, but they secretly want to be like you!

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