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Goldman CEO lauded profit from subprime shorts
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein attends a speech by U.S. President Barack Obama about financial regulation at Cooper Union in New York April 22, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Natalie Behring
WASHINGTON |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc's top executive boasted in late 2007 about the money the investment bank was making from betting against risky mortgages, according to a collection of e-mails released by a Senate panel on Saturday.
The emails were released ahead of a hearing on Tuesday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the origins of the financial crisis and come as the bank battles a fraud suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The emails could also help bolster support for financial regulation legislation that is due to come to the floor of the Senate on Monday.
"Of course we didn't dodge the mortgage mess. We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts," Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein said in an e-mail dating from November 2007.
"Sounds like we will make some serious money," said Goldman Sachs executive Donald Mullen in a separate group of e-mails from October 2007 about the performance of deteriorating second-lien positions in a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO.
The SEC suit charges Goldman hid vital information from investors about a subprime mortgage-linked security.
The subcommittee is due to hear from Blankfein and other Goldman executives about the role of investment banks in the financial crisis.
Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the subcommittee, said the emails showed Goldman "made a lot of money by betting against the mortgage market."
"Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs were not simply market-makers, they were self-interested promoters of risky and complicated financial schemes that helped trigger the crisis," Levin said in a statement.
Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for Goldman, said Levin's subcommittee had "cherry-picked just four e-mails from almost 20 million pages of documents and e-mails provided to it by Goldman Sachs. It is concerning that the subcommittee seems to have reached its conclusion even before holding a hearing."
Van Praag said that Goldman's profit and loss statements for 2007 and 2008 demonstrated "conclusively" that the firm did not make a "significant amount of money" in the mortgage market.
"What it does show," he said, "is that we had net losses of over $1.2 billion in residential mortgage-related products in the period. As a firm, we obviously could not have been significantly net short since we lost money in a declining housing market."
FORETELLING THE CRASH
Goldman says it did not act against its clients' interests.
An internal briefing paper prepared by Goldman for Tuesday's hearing says there was debate among Goldman executives in the spring of 2007 about the direction of the subprime residential market.
But some at Goldman were certain the subprime mortgage market was going to crash.
The Wall Street Journal quoted a March 2007 email from Fabrice Tourre, a bond trader and the only individual defendant in the SEC suit, as saying subprime borrowers would not last long.
"According to Sparks, that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!" Tourre wrote to his girlfriend, the journal said.
Daniel Sparks, a former head of the mortgages department at Goldman, and Tourre, are among those due to testify to Levin's subcommittee.
The SEC's April 16 lawsuit accuses Goldman of fraud for failing to tell clients that the debt securities they were buying had input from hedge fund Paulson & Co, which stood to benefit if the securities lost value.
John Paulson said his firm, not investors, will pay any legal fees related to the SEC lawsuit, the journal reported.
Five senior executives at Goldman sold company stock after the firm received notice from the SEC in July of possible fraud charges, the journal also reported.
The sales, totaling $65.4 million between October 2009 and February 2010, were made by co-general counsel Esta Stecher, vice chairmen Michael Evans and Michael Sherwood, principal accounting officer Sarah Smith and board member John Bryan, it said.
(Reporting by Dan Margolies, Karey Wutkowski, and Steve Eder in New York; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
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http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=324169
Based on the report by Timothy Geithner, we’re only currently on the hook for about $58 billion. A small price to pay considering the disaster that would have occurred.
All-in-all, I think it’s real easy to sit back and point fingers at the government, but the fact of the matter is they did the right thing at the time. There was no time to sort out who was a crook at the time. According to Paulson we had to inject money into our large financial institutions immediately or face a depression. From what I’ve heard this was a correct assessment of the situation.
The bailout was never intended to fix everything and make life go on as usual. It was intended to save us from a depression, which it did. If Paulson had not acted when he did, we might be in a situation similar to Greece.
Paulson’s only mistake was letting a personal rivalry with Bear Stearns leadership prevent a bailout. When Bear fell, they took AIG and a few others with them. That is tragic, but given the situation paulson is a human, like the rest of us, and was a hero under pressure.
I say well done Mr. Paulson. I still have a job that feeds my family, thanks to you, and I am grateful.
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