“73% Say It’s Likely Goldman Sachs Committed Fraud”
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_c ontent/business/general_business/april_2 010/73_say_it_s_likely_goldman_sachs_com mitted_fraud

“GS&Co. and certain of its affiliates, together with other financial services firms, have received requests for information from various governmental agencies and self-regulatory organizations relating to subprime mortgages, and securitizations, collateralized debt obligations and synthetic products related to subprime mortgages. GS&Co. and its affiliates are cooperating with the requests.”

The wells report means documents (millions of pages) have already been sifted through and and it is notification there is grounds for charges and warns action will commence, so I don’t think it does.

Note: this same notice was in the previous year’s annual report during the time the information was being handed over to the SEC.

Here’s 10(b):
“It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange,
(a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud,
(b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or
(c) To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person,

in connection with the purchase or sale of any security”

Some people have taken to saying that while what they did was morally wrong, it wasn’t illegal. If you are a judge or jury and you think they hid facts in a way that was misleading, that is all you need.

Goldman needs to stop the bravado and combative stance and deal with their deep ethical problems, pronto. Even if there is a small chance they beat the SEC charges, they face action in many jurisdictions. The odds that they are exonerated everywhere is exactly nil.

The SEC has confirmed what everyone suspected, that Goldman is not to be trusted, and that lack of trustworthiness is actionable.

On a day when GS reported huge earnings, their stock went down $3.34, and went down a little more in after hours trading. They got no bounce off those earnings, although the market may have already factored in their earning based on information that had come out before the earnings reports. So… maybe without the earnings, Friday’s big fall would have been worse.

So Goldman’s future might be falling stock prices, investors shying away from dealing with them, lots of legal expenses…..which can lead to falling stock prices, etc.

I am not saying death spiral here, but did anybody predict Bear Stearns death spiral happening in just a few days?

But as for the hard charges of fraud, I do believe they will stick. Goldman lied when they said to the CDO investors that an independent party selected the securities. And they lied again in their earnings call when they said that ACA was solely responsible for the selection of the securities. Indeed they are guilty of making false statements every time they repeat that line.

The reason the charges against Goldman will stick most of all is that in America, a jury of one’s peers means a jury of fellow American citizens, not a jury of fellow Wall Street traders. Only a fellow trader could be persuaded by Goldman’s tortured logic. If the trial is with a judge, well judges too are human and take into account both the spirit and letter of the law, like it or not.

What is beyond me is why Goldman insists on repeating that they did nothing wrong (and making this a referendum on the entire firm) rather than coming down hard on themselves and taking the wind out of the sails of their critics. It appears that Goldman would rather not take charge of their own reform, meaning forces outside of Goldman (including the governments of many nations) will be in the driver’s seat.

So which is it? It seems pretty cut and dried to me, and the rest of the words being scattered about are simply misdirection.

When they settle or win their case, they will still not be punished by a tarnished reputation, because their clients do not care about that. Their clients are typically just like them, in that they do not care how they make their money, or what effect it has on the economic system around them, as long as they profit. That might work in the short term, but it is not sustainable, for any parasite that kills its host eventually dies also.

And make no mistake, Goldman and their ilk are parasites. They add absolutely no value to society yet they extract an enormous amount of wealth and capital from it. I think the case against them is really designed to help get financial reform legislation passed, which is a good thing, but would still probably not prevent another devastating re-structuring of the nation’s and the world’s financial system. Forcing derivative trades to be traded on exchanges will not stop managers from getting their employers to take on excessive risk and leverage, which is really the cause of all this financial havoc, and can be stopped by regulators who actually believe in regulation.

Goldman is just like a polluter who dumps all kinds of toxic waste into rivers, lakes, and streams because “there’s no law against it”, and they can make more money if they pollute because it gives them an edge over their competition. Why anybody thinks that’s good for anybody not in line for a Goldman bonus is beyond me.

Should there be unethical trades and kickbacks, Paulson should be investigated for complicity to commit fraud.

We have reached the point where politics is impossible to parody. This makes “Springtime for Hilter” look like a searing documentory.

saying “a single transaction in the face of an extensive record”

is like when Floyd Landis said “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it”

It is a denial of guilt that actually implies guilt.