When the change the term civil to criminal and include a host of names behind it, then it will be good news.
Bookmark!
I have a very strong feeling that you don’t like Goldman Sachs at all....
These bloodsuckers knowingly sold toxic mortgage investments to their customers, and then bet against the investments. And then they blackmailed the Treasury saying, “If we go down, we’re taking all of you with us. Guarantee any losses with US taxpayer money or we will destroy the economy as well as rob you.”
Yeah these guys are major crooks. A civil suit is the LEAST that should happen to them.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/04/15/the-gops-real-plan-wall-street-bailouts-forever-in-exchange-for-campaign-cash/
Paulson Paulson Paulson where have I heard that name before. I know a Paulson that came from Goldman Sachs. What was his first name? He went into government. Give me a minute.
Taking the market with them on this one.
I think this was also what they were doing with Greece.
Don’t be fooled. This is all a ‘Dog and Pony’ show.
“Good news!..... for a most deserving criminal enterprise....”
Yeh, and according to what I have read, not the first time they have caused wide spread finacial turmoil.
Recently the Florida Bankers Association pressured (bribed) the FL Legislature into ramming through HB1523 and SB2270. These bills would remove Florida’s status as a Judicial State.
There seems to be two camps on this topic:
Camp 1 blames the homeowner.
Camp 2 blames the bankers and Wall Street.
I’m in Camp 2 because I have seen the fraud and know these “lenders” have often put up ZERO dollars to fund the loans. Then the lenders proceed to collect obscene profit through bogus insurance policies and various instruments like AIG’s Credit Default swaps.
If you are in Camp 2 like me, a rally will be held in Tallahassee Wednesday April 21. Bus rides are available.
Please see link below....
http://www.foreclosurehamlet.org/profiles/blogs/freedom-ride-circa-2010-a
The $hit is about to hit the fan!
Civil charges, not criminal. So, nobody is going to be shut down, or sent to jail.
When the Fed bailed out AIG, nearly all that money passed through to Goldman.
This is a joke, of course. The folks at GS are just doing their quid pro quo back to the Fed. And the PR of “doing their job” is completed by the SEC.
This is even more pathetic than Merrill Lynch and Elliot Spitzer back in 2001/2002.
Don’t get distracted. Who runs the SEC?
Answer: Obama
Who did Paulson work for?
Answer: GS
Ok, so, a small charge and a couple youngster VPs will be tossed under the bus. Why?
To distract from larger GS crimes that the SEC will ignore...AND, AND, AND,
To distract us from other stuff Obama is trying to push through like bank and lending “reform” and other disastrous bills.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
From National Review:
Goldman Sacked [Stephen Spruiell]
There seems to be some confusion over what the Goldman Sachs-SEC lawsuit is about. This isn’t just about the fact that Goldman sold its clients some bonds and then later bet against them. In my view, that wouldn’t be so bad. Goldman would be playing two independent roles in that story broker on one side, trader on the other and following independent strategies to hedge against market risk. Micromanaging investment banks’ hedging strategies could have all sorts of undesirable unintended consequences.
But the fraud alleged here is more serious than that, and it concerns the way Goldman structured and sold a particular bond, a structured product known as a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO). These products are not like ordinary stocks and bonds, which are pretty straightforward investments. They’re made up of the cash flows of a variety of underlying assets in this case, pools of mortgages. There was a heavy demand for these products during the housing boom, and investment banks such as Goldman were under pressure to keep churning them out. The charge against Goldman is that at least one of these products, a CDO called Abacus 2007-AC1, was built to fail.
The outside consultant Goldman hired to select which mortgages would go into the CDO, a hedge-fund manager named John Paulson, is now known as one of the most famous housing shorts ever he made an estimated $3.7 billion betting that these kinds of mortgage-backed bonds would go bad. So it is pretty disturbing that Goldman would bring him in as an “independent manager” to help it construct a CDO and not disclose this fact to the CDO’s buyers.
It would be like holding a basketball game, letting a Vegas sharp secretly select the players on one of the teams, and then presenting it to the public as a fair game. The sharp would have an incentive to select the worst players for his team and then bet against it. According to the SEC, that is exactly what Paulson and Goldman did:
According to the SEC’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the marketing materials for the CDO known as ABACUS 2007-AC1 (ABACUS) all represented that the RMBS portfolio underlying the CDO was selected by ACA Management LLC (ACA), a third party with expertise in analyzing credit risk in RMBS. The SEC alleges that undisclosed in the marketing materials and unbeknownst to investors, the Paulson & Co. hedge fund, which was poised to benefit if the RMBS defaulted, played a significant role in selecting which RMBS should make up the portfolio.
The SEC’s complaint alleges that after participating in the portfolio selection, Paulson & Co. effectively shorted the RMBS portfolio it helped select by entering into credit default swaps (CDS) with Goldman Sachs to buy protection on specific layers of the ABACUS capital structure. Given that financial short interest, Paulson & Co. had an economic incentive to select RMBS that it expected to experience credit events in the near future. Goldman Sachs did not disclose Paulson & Co.’s short position or its role in the collateral selection process in the term sheet, flip book, offering memorandum, or other marketing materials provided to investors.
If true, the SEC’s charges are pretty serious which might be why Goldman’s stock is taking a beating on the news.
As I understand it (partly from a report on CNBC) an officer at Goldman would select real estate loans to go into a CBO and based on the known low quality of those selections, short sell the same CBO as it was sold to investors that thought that they were getting quality securities. In other words, the same company that created the CBO shorted it after selling it. Man, that is cold and criminal.