There are other, more direct examples as well:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/14981

Podesta definitely has a working relationship with Soros and Soros acts as a major leader within the Democratic Party.

Podesta was the head of the Center for American Progress which was funded in part by George Soros Open Society Foundations.

@jstayz44 The Sandlers did not create the economic collapse. They certainly didn't create mortgage backed securities. Mortgage Backed Securities can be good or toxic depending on what is put in them. During the economic collapse, more and more bad mortgages were getting made and then sold to Wall Street and getting put into Mortgage Backed Securities. Even as these assets grew more toxic from (every year seemed to get worse) the ratings agencies kept finding a way to create AAA tranches.

And the Sandlers had NOTHING to do with this. They did not sell their mortgages to Wall Street to be put into mortgage backed securities. They literally were not part of the mortgage secularization chain. They kept their mortgages on their books, this meant they were holding on to the risk and thus had incentive not to lend to people who couldn't pay back.

They took a lot heat early on because Wachovia bought Golden West at the height of the housing bubble and then suffered a lot of losses. 2006 was a terrible time to buy a mortgage company, let alone pay $25 billion for one, but this is all hindsight. How many people knew in 2006 that 2008 was going to be as bad as it was? Very, very few. In fact this bank analyst at the beginning of 2008 thought Wachovia's $38 stock was fairly valued at $61. http://www.joshuakennon.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/wachovia-stock-report.jpg

At the time Wachovia took it over, Golden West earned 1.5 billion in profits that year. By late 2008 Wachovia ended up getting bought for only $15 billion by Wells Fargo when the crisis hit. Wachovia bought 7 financial services companies from 2003 to 2006.

What Sandler and GoldenWest did do was they were among the first outfits offering Adjustable Rate Mortgages. Adjustable Rate Mortages WERE one of the big causes of the crisis. Lots of the toxic loans in mortgage based securities were ARMs. However, none of these ARMs were from Sandler, because

A. they kept their mortgages and the risk themselves. They did not sell them into the Wall Street securitization machine.

B. Because of A, their mortgages were very different from other ARMs. They had very sound underwriting rules. They were not doing no income, no job loans, their underwriting standards required borrowers to put up a hefty down payment so they would be invested in the loan. Their loans also didn't screw the customers over. Their options didn't reset for 10 years way longer than other banks. This meant if you had a Sandler ARM and the great Recession hit you might be able to ride out the decrease in home prices. They didn't do two year teaser rates and then a balloon payment.

After the initial heat, when people looked into how Golden West pre-Wachoiva compared to the rest of the industry, the Sandlers came out looking pretty good. http://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_education_of_herb_and_marion.php

What is apparent from Wells Fargo data and the bank’s public statements is that the Pick-a-Pay portfolio is in much better shape than securitized option ARMs, and that Golden West’s loans performed better than the ones subsequently written by Wachovia.

Upon taking possession of the portfolio, Wells Fargo divided it between similarly sized “impaired” and “unimpaired” categories after Wachovia’s purchase. The average age of the unimpaired loans that Wells expects to perform well is five and a half years, squarely in the period when Golden West was writing them.

The impaired loans, meanwhile, skew significantly toward Wachovia’s tenure, with an average age of just over three and a half years. “Half of the problem loans had been generated after” the Pick-a-Pay portfolio was purchased by Wachovia, says one former Wachovia executive who had access to bank statistics. To entirely blame the Sandlers, he says, is “a bit unfair.”

When the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission issued its reported they mentioned Sandler and his Golden West company several times and they come off looking good. Page 20 warning the fed

Even those who had profited from the growth of nontraditional lending practices said they became disturbed by what was happening. Herb Sandler, the co-founder of the mortgage lender Golden West Financial Corporation, which was heavily loaded with option ARM loans, wrote a letter to officials at the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the OTS, and the OCC warning that regulators were “too dependent” on ratings agencies and “there is a high potential for gaming when virtually any asset can be churned through securitization and transformed into a AAA-rated asset, and when a multi-billion dollar industry is all too eager to facilitate this alchemy.”

Page 91 on subprime brokers gaming the system and gouging their customers

Critics argued that with this much money at stake, mortgage brokers had every incentive to seek “the highest combination of fees and mortgage interest rates the market will bear.” Herb Sandler, the founder and CEO of the thrift Golden West Financial Corporation, told the FCIC that brokers were the “whores of the world.”

page 106 long discussion of the ARMs compared to other companies mortgages

In 1975, the Sandlers merged Golden West with World Savings; Golden West Financial Corp., the parent company, operated branches under the name World Savings Bank. The thrift issued about 274 billion in option ARMs between 1981 and 2005. Unlike other mortgage companies, Golden West held onto them

Sandler told the FCIC that Golden West’s option ARMs—marketed as “Pick-aPay” loans—had the lowest losses in the industry for that product. Even in 2005—the last year prior to its acquisition by Wachovia—when its portfolio was almost entirely in option ARMs, Golden West’s losses were low by industry standards

In fact the report notes elsewhere that in 2006, losses in this portfolio had been less than 0.01 %.

page 110. They did low documentation loans, but only when they got a big down payment.

Or lenders might waive information requirements if the loan looked safe in other respects. “If I’m making a 65% to 75%, loan-to-value, I’m not going to get all of the documentation,” Sandler of Golden West told the FCIC. The process was too cumbersome and unnecessary. He already had a good idea how much money teachers, accountants, and engineers made—and if he didn’t, he could easily find out. All he needed was to verify that his borrowers worked where they said they did. If he guessed wrong, the loan-to-value ratio still protected his investment.

Short answer is "hell yes." It's infuriating to me that the Sandlers create the economic collapse through BS mortgage backed securities, and become an important player. I couldn't be more pissed off at the elites for fucking with EVERYONE E and ANYONE in every country and walk of life to meet their own fucking egotistical gain. God bless, I hope we ultimately win.