Goldman Sachs execs deny wrongdoing in Senate testimony

Goldman sach is the king of selling short game. The borrow cars(stocks) from stock owners,they sell them at good price.

Mwahahaha-- and the way Sach's beats its chest I doubt any of them will show remorse... ever.

Investing IS speculation - there are no guarantees.

Also, fraud is fraud. The real damage will not be a lawsuit, but Goldman's reputation with its customers, who might just feel a little differently than "Investing IS speculation"...

Investing IS speculation - there are no guarantees.

Nope, it seems to now be an excuse for a government takeover.

There is an old line that an investment is a successful speculation, and a speculation is an unsuccessful investment. So yes, the line can get blurred.

But basically, investing is buying something because it will (you hope) generate income down the line. Speculation is buying something because you will be able to (you hope) sell it a higher price later. Whether the asset you bought actually generates any income from whatever it does is irrelevant.

The world used to work on the basis of investment, now it is all about speculation. We are now starting to see the results of that.

Investing IS speculation - there are no guarantees. Agree with you though that it has gone to a different level. Fuelled by that nastiest of human traits - greed. Current crisis hasn't changed anything, and the gap (rich-poor) is still growing!

Perhapse you can explain to me why any struggling business should recieve aid at the expense of the taxpayer.

UH, they receive aid because that struggling business has the power to bring down the entire economy if they fail. And they exploit that power to extort money from the government and enrich themselves at everyone else's expense. Sorry, but the "it's ok for the government to lose money because they shouldn't have done it in the first place" argument makes zero sense. Sort of like it is ok to be a drug addict because you should never have started using. But now you are using, so no problem.

Anyways the scam that Goldman is part of, and this deal is just a tiny part of it, is as old as history. The creation of debt bubbles designed to legitimize a political and economic elite and their ideology, in this case neo-liberal, free market fundamentalism, and to enrich the members of the debt creating class. Works great until you run out of people to buy into the Ponzi scheme and then it goes into reverse. Has happened many times and each time, the elite claim nobody saw it coming. "Boss, I just pointed the gun at the guy's head and pulled the trigger, and this bullet came flying out and hit him in the head and killed him. How's a guy gonna know that's gonna happen? How ya gonna know?" How indeed.

“Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws”- Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"If you know your history, you will know where you are coming from" - Bob Marley

If it was just a case of an honest investment and a downturn in the market, 'you play, you pay' as some have said, then fair enough, but the playing table was rigged and the play wasn't fair as the dealer already knew the hand was a dud and, after dealing the hand, put their own bet on the other guy to cash in. In my books, that's fraud. It doesn't matter if taxpayer money is involved or not, fraud should still be prosecuted.

If you buy a house, there are laws that say the vendor must reveal any defects that they know of so the buyer can fully appraise the risk and whether they want to buy in to it or not. Are other investments such as the GS ones also covered by similar laws?

"Some" people didn't lose money. You lost the money through the US government subsidization of GS and Wall Street. That is the whole point.

Which shouldn't have been done in the first place. Government has no place in business and this is the result, a whole lot of complaining about how they're losing taxpayer money when they never should have recieved it in the first place. Perhapse you can explain to me why any struggling business should recieve aid at the expense of the taxpayer. The way I figure it the U.S goverment made an investment, and they lost on it and now they're pissed off, deal with it, everyone else has.

Goldman Sachs execs deny wrongdoing in Senate testimony

And how they did that with their pants on fire, I'll never know.

Taka

Goldman sach is the king of selling short game. The borrow cars(stocks) from stock owners,they sell them at good price.

When stock value goes down,the buy them back at low price ,make a profit and give them back to the stock owner,with their revenues.

Plenty of risks for all in this game for owner,stock brokers (middle man Goldman) and shart mart buyers. When the dow is at 11K IS GOOD TO PLAY THIS SHORT SELLING.

WHEN the dow falls to 6K to 7K,then is when short selling becomes Lehman Brothers. Now that stocks are back at 11K,is good time for short selling again.

WHO is paying for that 5K top up at Dow ,US citizen's Public debt of 80 percent or more of US GDP.

US GDP is 14000 billion,the public debt that US citizens have to pay back via loans is 11000 billions.

The sooner someone comes up with a better system in USA money making systems,the better for USA.

Everyone know the disease,who going to be the doctors ,to cure the economic short selling disease and other economic diseases of modern day stock markets/stock trading/forex trading.

YOU PLAY YOU PAY... maybe. but no way YOU play WE ALL pay!!!!!

how about turning the table, socializing profits and privatizing the risks for change?!

You play you pay: no complain; but this is something like WE play you pay.

You play you pay? Sorry I don't quite agree with that. I'm not a player in the market for many reasons, neither am a gambler in general. However why is it that when it is found out that a horse race (or a college basketball game for that matter) was fixed recriminations abound, yet in the financial world when discovered that the race was fixed there is forgiveness for the initiators and scorn for the punters?

Fabulous Fab and his ilk are the worst bottom feeders around, worse than the 419 scams, the "ore ore" scams and, dare I say it make most lawyers look almost honest.

When a country loses so much manufacturing jobs to others, people have nothing else to do but bet, playing games...

predictable outcome constitutes intent. period. the nerve

from what i've read it seems that GS created this security abacus and sold it and at the time they also took a long position in it. but when the markets subsequently turned south, they took short positions against it and made a ton of money. if that's the case i don't see any wrong doing. the problem would be where they were selling at same time as they were betting against it. in that case they would not just be matching buyers and sellers.

@gyoza- Goldman was subsidized by the US and British governments through the subsidization of their counter-parties, in particular AIG and Royal Bank of Scotland. No money for them to pay out to Goldman and there would be no money for Goldman, and also they might have been on the hook to pay John Paulson. RBS paid out their losses to Paulson two days before they were taken over by the British government. They are also subsidized in all kinds of indirect ways through the Federal Reserve, most blatantly through by being allowed to change to a bank holding company which allows them to borrow directly from the Fed at near 0% and then turn around and buy treasury bonds paying 3 or 4%. Hey I could be a savvy businessman doing that too.

As for having no "speculators", you would have an economy run by "investors". I'm old enough to remember sitting watching Louis Rukheyser on PBS with my Dad back in the 70's, as he would earnestly try to get people interested in this boring place called Wall Street. "Investing is what builds America, you should learn more about it" he would say, or some such stuff. But investing is boring, sitting around for years having to build things, and not so useful when have bogus economic theories to push, like Ronnie and Maggie did. Much better to start speculating and get some action happening.

And now we are all going to pay through the nose for the "good times".

This case is complicated. At least with Enron everybody knew why they were scumbags, the Goldman Sachs case sounds a lot like a shaky investment gone south and that’s not illegal or fraudulent, it’s just poor business strategy.

Exactly! This investigation is just the neo-communists doing their thing.

You play and you pay.

Speculators is what ran gasoline prices prices up over $4.00 a gallon, remember? They'd take the dimes off their mother's eyes, laying in the coffin, given the chance.

Wrongdoing, yeah I think so. < :-)

You would have an economy where certain speculators for Goldman Sachs don't earn a billion $ a day and indebt/takeover whole nations.

@GJDailleult - GS didn't actually get subsidy money from the US government - they had made probably enough out of the crisis to get by without. Question for you though, I'm intrigued by your comment. If there are no "speculators", what kind of economy would you have?

Of course they deny any wrongdoing. You think they were going to say they were guilty of all things that the senate alleged. These guys are sh***y, just like the products they were peddling. < :-)

End of the golden days of investment banking. These geniuses will have to find a new racket.

So some people lost money

"Some" people didn't lose money. You lost the money through the US government subsidization of GS and Wall Street. That is the whole point.

Having one company issue securities, be the market maker in those securities, and be trading those same securities for their own account is a massive conflict of interest and is INSANITY. Having that same company parachute their own staff into the senior positions at the US Treasury, and to also be a primary dealer for the Federal Reserve (and whatever other relationship they have) is also insane.

And it doesn't matter whether what they do is "criminal" or not. Any country that allows their economy to be taken over by speculators and financial racketeers is clearly nuts and going down the tubes.

Not being anti-American there, there are lots of other countries that qualify. Number 1 being the UK of course.

This is like asking a Yakuza if they did any "wrongdoing" today --> but at least those people are brazenly honest and don't hide behind others.

With Goldman-Sachs they are more like brazen cowards --> besides the money real criminals can't respect these people. Too much corruption.

This case is complicated. At least with Enron everybody knew why they were scumbags, the Goldman Sachs case sounds a lot like a shaky investment gone south and that’s not illegal or fraudulent, it’s just poor business strategy.

The more the media plays focuses and the more the government ramps this particular case up the more it looks like cheap show. All the banter and though talk are a joke and it becomes more and more transparent every day.

Goldman has fought back against the fraud charges with a public relations blitz aimed at discrediting the SEC’s case and repairing the bank’s reputation. Some big clients are publicly backing the firm.

Wait a second. Isn't the main case against them that they didn't act in their client’s best interests? If the clients are supporting them than what's the problem? So some people lost money, that happens every day, nothing you can do about it.

As for discrediting the SEC, they're too late; between the porn scandal and the numerous mishandlings they don't have any credit to diss.

Levin pressed Daniel Sparks, the former head of Goldman’s mortgages department, on whether the company felt it had a moral obligation to disclose to clients that it was making side bets against the same investments it was selling them.

It's difficult to say what they're really obligated to do. I guess it comes down to intent. If they intentionally create a product that they think will fail then try to sell it as a good investment then I think they've crossed the line, like with Abacus.

But creating a product and selling someone else's product are two different things. It's not like they can refuse to be the middle man in a transaction for a client if they don't personally agree that it will make money. It would be like a real estate salesman saying he won't sell the office building to a company because he personally thinks it's not a good fit for them. Sometimes you're just the middle man accepting sales based on what your customers believe will happen which is open to opinion. The market is made by people who bet one way and people who bet the other way. You can't tell Goldman that they're only allowed to do business with people who agree with their opinion about an investment.

Lloyd Blankfein earned more than $70m in 2007 - a record for a Wall Street executive. He earned less than $1m in 2009 and told a magazine interviewer "I'm doing God's work"...ah what crap ..saying this when millions lost their jobs and homes

When you are a criminal you can do no wrong -especially when you have The President in your corner. =Libs.

Serve them the s_____y sandwich back.

saying that customers buying securities from the investment house came looking for risk and that’s what they got.

-Bernie Madoff couldn't have said it better.