"Moi, Un Criminelle? I Fart At You, Américains stupides!"
Fabrice Tourre,
Congressional Inquiry Into Causes Of The
Financial Crisis (Photo: Forbes online, 4/27/10)
Goldman-Sachs, home of the best money that money can buy, is reported to be the target of a Department Of Justice criminal investigation, prompted by information forwarded from the SEC.
Bloomberg and the NYT reported the story under National news.
The federal review, which lawyers say is common in such a high-profile case, is being done by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Bloomsberg financial news reported. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs on April 16, alleging fraud tied to collateralized debt obligations that contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Based on public reports about the SEC matter, a criminal case may be difficult, said Douglas R. Jensen, an attorney with Park & Jensen LLP in New York ... “In order to proceed criminally in a case, you need to have very clear evidence of lying, cheating and stealing,” said Jensen...
"Dunno Why The Fuk I Be Heah; Um juss a Businessman; Capiche?"
Goldman BSD Blankfein Swears, Kinda, To Talk 'Bout Somethin',
Maybe (Photo: Jason Reed / Reuters / ABC News Online 4/27/10)
Little Rupert's Wall Street Journal, however reported it as "Politics" and with a little not-very-subtle spin informs us that Congress is really just trying to mislead the public:
Senators vs. Goldman
The committee members fumble toward finding the real villains
[Unsigned Article]
If an investor buys shares in General Electric, and then GE's stock declines in the future, is the New York Stock Exchange to blame? What if the investor chooses to purchase the shares through TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab? Is the broker also responsible for the losses?
Senators interrogating Goldman Sachs executives yesterday appear to believe the firm has a duty to protect all of its institutional trading partners from making bad decisions... Yet much of the Beltway class, looking back at the financial crisis, now believes that gamblers who bet their money on an always-inflating housing bubble are the real victims...
...In sum, it appeared to be another bad day for the SEC's specific case against Goldman. But lawmakers seemed intent on finding the firm generally guilty of meeting institutional demand for subprime housing risk.
Messr. Tourre Leaving The Capitol: Calimari, Anyone?
It's like the age-old defense of the rapist: "Hey; She Was Askin' For It! She Wanted It!" It's really the fault of the banks and clients to whom Goldman sold those bad investments, because... they wanted it. They forced us.
We're not sure which of the politicians at yesterday's Senate hearing did the most to confuse spectators. Investigations subcommittee chairman Carl Levin of Michigan seemed unaware of the difference between a market-maker, whose role is to offer prices at which a client may buy or sell a given asset, and an investment adviser, whose role is to act in the interests of the client as a fiduciary.
Ranking member Susan Collins of Maine showed that she understood the difference, yet still decided to badger the market makers at Goldman Sachs to admit they weren't acting as fiduciaries. [Who have an obligation to advise clients about risk] Of course they weren't, as their sophisticated institutional customers would have known.
But the heart of the argument against The Masters Of The Universe is this: If you knew your investments were made up of crap, even if your role was not to act as a 'Fiduciary', didn't you still have an obligation to inform others they were selling bags of toxic waste?
Goldman's responses when questioned were to use the same logic as Little Rupert's anonymous writer in the WSJ. Come on, you idiots; We had no obligation to define risk to other players. We sold them stuff to make money. They were in it to make money.
They know how the game's played -- they lost! We won! And that's all that matters. That's how the free market operates, you fookin' Peasants. Do ya hate freedom, is that it?
Goldman's Legacy To Our Kultur.
But those kinds of answers just obscure and evade the real, basic question in everybody's mind: Didn't you have an obligation not to sell bad investments at all?
What's disgusting about the performance of people like Tourre and Blankfein this week is their inability to comprehend the legitimacy of that question. From the perspective of a player, A Big Swinging Dick In Wall Street, they haven't done anything wrong -- and if you believe we have... well, you stupid Peasants, we'll just buy our way out of it.
Who Cares About The Little People? (Cartoon: Abstruse Goose)
However, free of cant, the truth is that Goldman sold toxic crap, because they could. Because they wanted to make more money. It was the Game, Baby; the Game, and the payoff was More. The proof is that as a company, they bet against the performance of their own investments to win big if the subprime market collapsed -- or as Little Lloyd Blankfein put it in a memo, "short [on] mortgages saved the day".
Little Rupert's media suggests this is a political prosecution -- an attack on the 'Free Market' by the minions of a socialist scary Black Man who faked his way into the Presidency. It's true that the SEC is hard-pressed to remake its image as a guardian of financial regulation -- but that is because it did nothing to prevent the behavior Wall Street engaged in during those go-go, Lil' Boots Bush years (Remember him? Yeah, he was just, you know, some guy or other) which put us where we are today.
The "excesses of the free market" which brought about the destruction of the lives of so many people -- the Little People that our Masters Of The Universe don't give two farts about -- occurred because there was no oversight.
And no matter whether Little Rupert wants to spin this scrutiny of Goldman-Sachs as political; it isn't, and all of Warren Buffet's comments or Blankfein's appearances on television to blow smoke will not change that.
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