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Is the Goldman Sachs CEO going to make a stand today or cower and roll over?

C’mon! It’s not like marching 9 miles in a snowstorm with nothing but burlap wrapped around your bleeding feet!

I was explaining the situation with Goldman Sachs to someone on another web site this way. The sub prime market melt down resulted from the doubling down on the Communities Re-investment Act in 1995 that forced banks to take unprecedented risks in home mortgages. Banks are in business to make a profit so they hedged their bets on the mortgages by bundling them and selling them off like grab bags to willing investors, who knew the risks. It's simply legalized gambling. To further hedge their bets, they were selling the mortgage market short. They knew how bad the mortgages really were, and so did all the other banks.

But now, Goldman and Obama are playing a different game, hedging their bets in a far different way. They are betting that the new regulations that Obama wants to put on banks will hurt the Goldman Sachs competitors more than it will Goldman Sachs because G.S. has made a deal with the devil and hedged their bets in a very different way. Instead of sub prime mortagages, G.S. has been picked be the main backer of the Chicago Carbon Credit Exchange, selling non-existent carbon credits instead of bad mortgages, selling empty grab bags, instead of the risky grab bags of bad mortgages. So, Goldman Sachs will take a slap on the wrist and perhaps be banned from selling any Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac mortgages (oh, darn) and instead just sell those carbon credits.