Meeting Thursday

(TO BE UPDATED LATER SUNDAY)

AT TNC

WALKING into the reception area of the Hilton Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, where the Nature Conservancy was having its fall board business meeting, I had one goal in mind: to meet and visit---however briefly---with the new TNC president and CEO, Mark Tercek who had arrived from Goldman Sachs less than a year ago.

I'd already met Hank Paulson, Tercek's former boss at Goldman, in 2006 as he was stepping down as TNC board chairman to accept then-president Bush's offer to become Treasury Secretary. (I won't even go into the ensuing bailout bubble Paulson engineered which greatly profited Goldman.)

Paulson's involvement and fast friendship with TNC frankly left me uneasy in ways I couldn't put my finger on at the time. As Paulson stepped away from TNC, he accomplished another fast feat that left me even uneasier: He managed to have his protege at Goldman Mark Tercek named president and CEO of the conservation organization. Tercek is a man who had absolutely no background, no experience and no prior known interest in land conservation in America. It was unheard of for TNC to name such a man to head its million-member organization. Unheard of. And yet it did it anyway. Why? I wondered.

I kept asking myself, Why in the world would Goldman Sachs suddenly want to be so palsy-walsy with The Nature Conservancy and vice versa? Carbon credits vaguely kept popping into the back my mind.

Then in early July of 2009, I read Matt Taibbi's wildly popular and controversial article in Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs called The Great American Bubble Machine, chronicling the big financial bubbles of the 20th century and how Goldman had positioned itself ahead of each-and-every curve so it profited wildly, always getting out before the bubble burst. Bingo! I finally understood my undefined unease over TNC being in bed with Goldman and the dots started to get connected:

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

So, Taibbi contended in closing that Goldman Sachs, as the smartest money in the world, smells wads and wads of money ahead of the carbon bubble it will help to inflate. But he stopped short of actually saying some of the ways Goldman is positioning itself to skim the cream off the top of the Carbon/Climate Change bubble.

So, let's see if I can help connect those dots in the next several posts and talk about why Goldman people are especially enamoured with its new best friend, TNC. *************

As I was saying, I wanted to meet Tercek at the TNC meeting and size him up for myself. I didn't have to wait long. As I signed in at the reception tables and picked up my name tag, a very tall, lanky man turned to me and said: "Hello, I'm Mark Tercek, and who might you be?"

To be continued....