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A Ray Of Hope
Dealbreaker — ... Yes, you should be worried that the target rate is 0.00 - 0.25%. Yes, you can't make a buck in this market, country's going to hell faster than when that sonofabitch Roosevelt was around... too much cheap money sloshing around the world. The biggest mistake we ever made was letting Nixon get off the gold standard. There is some good news though. Goldman's effective tax rate will be 1% for 2008, or about $14 million, and we've got that going for us, so that's nice. Goldman Sachs's Tax Rate Drops to 1%, or $14 Million, for 2008 [Bloomberg]

The World’s Largest Hedge Fund
The Big Picture — Good Evening: As was speculated in this commentary last night, the FOMC did indeed take dramatic action today after concluding its two day meeting. The Fed changed its approach to interest rate targeting by offering to allow the funds rate to sway to float within a 25 basis point range. Since the lower boundary of said range is zero, the Fed felt compelled to announce its readiness to undertake further measures. Some will describe these current and future actions as “quantitative easing”, but a better description might be the poker analogy proffered on Bloomberg Television this afternoon: “The Fed is All In”. Not that ...

Goldman Sachs, Income Taxes, and Transfer Pricing
EconoSpeak — Bloomberg reports: Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007. The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent … The rate decline looks “a little extreme,” said Robert Willens, president and chief executive officer of tax and accounting advisory firm Robert Willens LLC. “I was definitely taken aback,” Willens said. “Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income ...