Well, isn't this dandy? Looks like Goldman is the new Enron:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
As the U.S. housing market started to slide, executives at the most legendary investment bank on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, were trading e-mails in which they cheered the declines, even when those declines meant some of their clients were taking major losses, according to newly released documents.
Yeah, ain't that a laugh?
All emphasis added hereafter:
The documents show that the firm's executives were celebrating earlier investments calculated to benefit if housing prices fell, a Senate investigative committee found. In an e-mail sent in the fall of 2007, for example, Goldman executive Donald Mullen predicted a windfall because credit-rating companies had downgraded mortgage-related investments, which caused losses for investors.
"Sounds like we will make some serious money," Mullen wrote.
Hey Mitch McConnell! How do you feel now? Still gonna try and protect your banking clan Wall Street pals?
On Dec. 14, 2006, Viniar (David A. Viniar, Goldman's chief financial officer - RSRS), called Goldman's mortgage traders and risk managers to a meeting and concluded they would reduce overall exposure to the subprime mortgage market. This was largely done by making bets against the market to cancel out bets it had placed that the market would rebound. The company's document acknowledges that Goldman at times shorted the overall market but describes those periods as temporary while the firm was rebalancing its portfolio.
At some moments, executives were actually considering making new investments in mortgages, buying potentially undervalued securities that could pay off when the market turned around. A day after Viniar met with the traders and risk managers, he wrote to Tom Montan, co-head of the securities division, saying, "There will be very good opportunities as the market goes into what is likely to be even greater distress and we want to be in position to take advantage of them."
The Democrats need to take this story everywhere. This is sickening. I wonder what the right's gonna have in response to this. This should be an interesting week in politics.