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.
...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.- mcclatchy
This is from a lobbying document Goldman has been passing around the senate on financial regulatory reform in general.
There is a lot of crazy stuff in this document, but the most notable is probably this passage, in which Goldman pooh-poohs the notion that complete transparency in markets creates accurate prices.
Instead, the bank argues that an over-the-counter market in which big traders like Goldman get to do deals in the shadows in “dark pools” without the retail investor having any knowledge of what the hell is going on is somehow better for everybody, that this somehow produces better prices. Of course the reality is that the two-tiered system creates one pool of fools whose every movement is visible to every animal on the Serengeti, and another pool of giant bloodthirsty carnivores who get to walk around invisible, picking off the Dik-Diks one by one.
Everyone I showed this to had the same reaction — “I can’t believe they said this out loud.” - Taibblog
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