Where’s Goldman’s Waldo?
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was out last night with its list of demands from Goldman. And while I certainly think Goldman was wrong, morally, if not legally, when it purposely created worthless bonds so that hedgie John Paulson and indeed its own trading desk could benefit (Goldman denies this), I …
Last week, it was big news when the four Wall Street firms (Goldman, Citi, Bank of America and JP Morgan) announced that they had gone the entire first quarter of 2010 without a down day on their trading desks. Look Mom, no losses. Some were skeptical. Called Wall Street a fixed game. Well turns out a perfect quarter is not such a great …
“It’s like watching the emergency room doctors save the life of the drunk driver who just plowed into the car in which your family was riding.”
A funny take from Tom Tomorrow on the idea of selling of “a useless product that will probably blow up” in the faces of consumers who purchase it.
Things keep getting worse for Goldman Sachs. Late yesterday news broke that federal prosecutors are looking into whether to bring criminal fraud charges against the Wall Street firm. (The outstanding SEC lawsuit involves only civil charges.) No word yet on any details about what those new charges may entail.
Nonetheless, stock analysts …
“I think most people in Las Vegas would take offense at having Wall Street compared to Las Vegas. Because in Las Vegas, actually people know that the odds are against them. They play anyway. On Wall Street, they manipulate the odds while you’re playing the game. And I would say that it’s actually much more dishonest.”
Today’s Goldman Sachs hearing in the Senate is fantastic theater. The kind of theater that makes you want to run to the restroom to vomit.
I’ve been watching the hearing on TV, and I am nauseated to report that they still don’t get it. The world came to the brink of financial ruin, and the people driving the mortgage securities …
Today’s WSJ op-ed page has a curious defense of keeping more-complex derivatives off exchanges. It goes like this: when someone (like John Paulson) takes a short position on a derivative (like a synthetic CDO), that’s really important information for the market to have since it signifies John Paulson’s opinion that the thing tied to the …
Over the weekend, a Senate Committee headed by Carl Levin released dozens of 4 private Goldman Sachs e-mails. (UPDATE: Dozens more were voluntarily released by Goldman.) They show the computer chatter among Goldman’s top brass, and top mortgage market players during mid-2007, which is the time the housing market was going from …
Back in December, the New York Times ran a story about Goldman and some collateralized debt obligations they underwrote. Turns out the CDOs, which were constructed by pooling together other bonds, performed badly. Really, really badly. The thrust of the Times piece was that Goldman routinely created CDOs with the worst mortgage bonds it …
The market is down again today and one of the reasons people have cited for the recent 800 point drop in the Dow is that investors are worried about the bank regulations coming out of the Obama administration. The first part of the argument is that Obama’s plan to tax the banks and limit what they can and can’t do will hurt profits of …
So far it appears the most noteworthy document of the 250,000 pages obtained by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, which is holding a hearing on Wednesday on AIG’s government bailout, is a 44-page powerpoint presentation put together by bond firm Blackrock analyzing the insurer’s ability to negotiate haircuts on its …
