How Goldman Secretly Bet on the U.S. Housing Crash

Adjustable Rate Mortgages, Baba Booey, Bear Stearns, Citibank, Henry Paulson, TARP, Tim Geithner, Treasury, Wall Street, Washington Mutual

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Sun, Nov. 01, 2009

Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

November 01, 2009 01:17:44 AM

WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

“The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who’s proposed a massive overhaul of the nation’s banks. “This is fraud and should be prosecuted.”

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman’s maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

“It would look much more damaging,” Coffee said, “if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless.”

Continue reading →

Dylan Ratigan Breaks Down the TARP Fiasco

AIG, Bank of america, Bear Stearns, Citibank, Corporate Communists, Credit markets, Dylan Ratigan, FDIC, Federal Reserve Board, GDP, Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Neil Barofsky, TARP, Tim Geithner, Too Big to Fail, Toxic Assets, Treasury Department, Wall Street

Matt Taiibi : Naked Short-Selling Caught on Video

AIG, Bear Stearns, Citibank, Deep Capture, Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, Jim Cramer, Lehman Brothers, Matt Taibbi, Naked Short-Selling, Patrick Byrne, Stock Exchange, Wall Street

Matt Taibbi

True Slant

Caught On Tape: A Naked Swindle

Continuing with the theme of naked short-selling, I have a video that was given to me last week that will allow people to see how naked short-selling can take place.

This video is only 31 seconds long and what it shows is a day-trader trying to sell short shares in a major NYSE-traded stock. To disguise the identity of the trader, I’ve had to edit out the name of the company in question — I’ll call it BANK X for short. What I can say is that the stock in question is one of America’s largest financial companies and the recipient of an enormous amount of public bailout money, so the fact that its stock can be manipulated is something that should be a concern to everyone.

Continue reading →

Matt Taibbi: "Wall Street's Naked Swindle"

AIG, Bear Stearns, Citi, Federal Reserve, George Bush, Henry Paulson, Lehman Brothers, Matt Taibbi, Merrill Lynch, Tim Geithner, Wall Street

Bernie Madoff’s Guide to New York Restaurants

Bankers, Bernie Madoff, New York, Restaurants, Wall Street

By Pete Wells

In an inspired piece of forensic accounting, Eater analyzes Bernie Madoff’s American Express statements to discover where the Ponzi schemer ate, what he spent, and how he tipped. His go-to restaurant for the period in 2008 covered by the statements was Lure. (But if he liked it so much, how come he only tipped six percent?) Lure was followed closely by Houston’s; perhaps Mr. Madoff found their spinach-artichoke dip irresistible. Or maybe it was just close to his office.

Breaking The Bank : Behind The Financial Meltdown ~ Frontline [Video]

Bank of america, Frontline, Hank Paulson, IMF, John Thain, Ken Lewis, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Michael Kirk, Simon Johnson, Wall Street

F R O N T L I N E

In Breaking the Bank, FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Bush’s War) draws on a rare combination of high-profile interviews with key players Ken Lewis and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to reveal the story of two banks at the heart of the financial crisis, the rocky merger, and the government’s new role in taking over — some call it “nationalizing” — the American banking system.

It all began on that fateful weekend in September 2008 when the American economy was on the verge of melting down. Then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, his former protégé John Thain, and Ken Lewis, one of the most powerful bankers in the country, secretly cut a deal to merge Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.

The merger of the nation’s largest bank and Merrill Lynch was supposed to help save the American financial system by preventing the imminent Lehman Brothers bankruptcy from setting off a destructive chain reaction. But it became immediately clear that it had not worked. Within days, the entire global financial system was collapsing.

In Washington, Secretary Paulson was determined to spend billions of government dollars to prevent the American banking system from dragging the country into a depression. That October, Lewis, Thain and other top bank CEOs found themselves at an emergency meeting at the Treasury Department. Paulson told the group they had no choice but to accept $125 billion of capital from American taxpayers in order to save the financial system. Initially, Bank of America’s CEO Lewis was supportive of the plan. “We are so intertwined with the U.S. that it’s hard to separate what’s good for the United States and what’s good for Bank of America,” Lewis tells FRONTLINE.

But some observers now say that Paulson’s injection of public capital was the beginning of unprecedented government involvement in the nation’s banking system, with consequences few understood.

“I think we nationalized the banks in the U.S. on that day,” former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson says. “The government got a lot of say in how they are run, a lot of constraints, a lot of responsibility. A lot of downside risk was taken on that day.”

By December, Lewis was discovering what it meant to have the government as a partial owner. When fourth-quarter losses at Merrill grew to $15 billion, Lewis began to look for a way to get out of the deal. But in tense negotiations with government officials, Lewis was told he had no choice. If he did not go through with the merger, regulators threatened to change the bank’s management.

“Ken Lewis blinked, the full force of the government is being brought upon him. The rules of the game have changed,” Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Fitzpatrick says. “Ken Lewis is on top of the financial services world, but he’s not in charge. The government holds all the cards at the end of the day.”

FRONTLINE’s Breaking the Bank tells the story of Lewis’ struggle to survive in this new financial order, where public outrage and government edicts are now as important to banking as shareholders and deposits. With his bank on the brink, Lewis now finds himself the subject of a shareholder revolt, congressional indignation, presidential pressure and the increasingly conflicting demands of private investors and government officials.

“This is more than a story about just one man or one bank,” says producer Michael Kirk. “This is the story of the most important change in the relationship between government and private business in a generation.”