Goldman Sachs.. A word for the pariah !

So when did America stop loving its winners? Growing up in a cold dreary corner of England America always seemed like a shining beacon, an amazing place, an iconic idea that radiated through every corner of the world. Anything was possible in America, it was the land of dreams, the land that stood up for those who couldn't stand up for themselves, the land of ultimate opportunity. The cultural difference to my little world was clear and portrayed through our TV screens each Saturday night, America was glitz, it was Dallas & Dynasty with a hint of Baywatch thrown in for fun, it was TV where the audience said "If I excel then that's how great my life can be" whilst in England the mentality was somewhat different. Coronation Street & Eastenders vied nightly to be more depressing than the other, the desired audience mentality? "Hey my life might be shit and depressing but Pauline Fowler's in a much worse way than me, that makes me feel better, i like this program !"... Fast forward 20 years and seriously what's gone wrong with the American dream ? Sure England's mentality’s still just as messed up as it was but over the past eight years America in so many sad ways has followed down the same wrong and worrying path. Watching the news everyone winges, everyone blames everyone else, nobody seems to think as once they so surely did. I'm sure in entries to follow I'll verbally scratch my head and wonder why the worlds premier society is doing all it can to fight its inspiring leader and to stand so clearly in the way of its own unrivaled potential, today however I'll raise comment on just one tiny spec where I feel comment is due.... Goldman Sachs.


I cant believe that my first entry through this new medium is a note that's going to be sympathetic to a bunch of self involved Goldmanites but hey, life's life and today I just happen to feel that given the evidence that’s been revealed to date the baying crowd is calling, as often it does, for the wrong blood. If we're called to Jury duty and presented with a defendant who's most certainly unpleasant but for the charge on which he stands trial he seems to have an iron clad alibi are we supposed to convict anyway to appease public outcry or do we have a duty to reach a judgment on the specific crime from the specific evidence that’s presented before us? I think we all know the answer to this.


So the SEC investigate the big GS for what a year and this is all they could find ? That a 31 year old French kid with an over inflated ego and the stupidity to brand himself with the title "Fabulous Fab" may or may not have misled two of the worlds most sophisticated investors in a single deal that Goldman themselves lost money on ? That’s it ? Are you serious !... So Goldman are back to making a lot of money, why ? because they're serial fraudsters ? no, because they hire the smartest kids from the best schools and pay the highest compensation on the street to keep them, its not rocket science its simply common sense. If you take complicated global financial markets, unprecedented global volatility and you have the sharpest minds working with the best technology then guess what, your more likely than not to make a very large amount of money. Was the collapse in the US housing market to blame for the global meltdown in 2008 ? I'd say largely yes... Are Goldman Sachs solely to blame for that as the hysteria would have us believe? Absolutely not.


Goldman Sachs employs some 35,000 staff in offices all around the world, in 2009 they paid these 35,000 staff $16.14 billion dollars or nearly half a million bucks per employee whilst the world around them fell into unemployment and recession, this makes bystanders angry but in its self it doesn't make Goldman Sachs guilty. Goldman were but one of many Wall Street banks crying out for raw mortgage product from the turn of the millennium till the big bubble burst in 08, this demand certainly tooled armies of irresponsible mortgage brokers and local lenders to loan too much money to those they should never have approved in the first place knowing that Wall Street would buy the risk off them quicker than they could blink so who cared. This demand in its self was fueled by global investors craving blind returns on granular product that the ratings agencies told them was “Riskless”… So who was to blame really… Greedy and ignorant investors the world over buying securitised rubbish at insanely tight spreads? Ratings agencies that did a terrible job an representing risk to all? Banks & Investment banks that securitised raw product and thus encouraged more and more outrageous lending further down the pipe? The local banks and mortgage originators who simply knew they were making less than stable loans? Or unpopular as it may be how about ultimately those individuals that have since defaulted on loans that in all honesty they should never have taken out in the first place as they knew they were too big to support? "I've lost my home cuz the bank foreclosed" well maybe the bank should never have lent you the money to buy your home in the first place. Is Goldman Sachs more guilty than all the others combined simply because they spotted the dangers and hedged their books better and quicker than the rest of the greedy heard ? Surely not, if housing prices had continued to go up, this hedged or “short” position would’ve lost significant money and Goldman Sachs would’ve been singled out as the only Wall Street bank that lost money during the housing boom.


But just as the Jury in the murder case lets get back to the specific sound bytes we hear today on CNN. It amazes me how time after time smart US businessmen manage to sit in front of ignorant US lawmakers and answer their retarded questions without shaking their head and saying “Seriously, do you have any idea what your talking about ?”… How do some of these people get elected? Some of these questioners don’t know the difference between the chairman of the Federal Reserve & the secretary of Treasury (Marcy Kaptur, Jan 08) and others after investigating a specific problem for over a year obviously still have absolutely no idea how a synthetic CDO works !... A Synthetic CDO isn’t a stock or a barrel of oil that’s bought, owned, sold or brokered, it’s a synthetic agreement where one party takes one side of the bet and the other takes the other for the life of the trade… Simple as that… When Goldman or anyone else issued a synthetic CDO to a buyer who wanted to take risk in a specific area then they (Goldman) are immediately left with only 3 options… 1, Sit on the short themselves for the life of the trade and loose money if the trade performs, 2, sell or broker the short risk to someone else who has an inverse view to their original client or 3, short something else to keep their net exposure as flat as possible… Whichever they decide the buyer knows one of the three is happening so seriously ACA get over it… The next point that’s baffling me is this… Lawmakers sit there and piously say “How dare you sell something you don’t believe in to a client”… Well what the hell else are they supposed to do with it ? Blindly sit on the risk indefinitely, erode their shareholders capital and ultimately fire their 35,000 employees like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wachovia or any number of others.. Is that what lawmakers and taxpayers would have preferred?.. No, GS had a fiduciary duty to manage their risk and if that means selling assets at prices that obviously reflect the fact they’re not healthy to institutional clients who are some of the most enlightened investors in the world then that’s just disciplined business. Trust me I don’t think I’ve ever met a Goldman employee who I really liked but hey, credit where credits due these guys didn’t really need the government investment that they were pushed into taking so Citi didn’t look as individually awful as they were in October 08 , they paid every cent back at the earliest opportunity with a large chunk of 23% interest and now they’re back doing what they’ve always been very good at, making money, paying taxes and stimulating the economy of their local Mercedes dealerships (that they probably own as a side bet :) !)


I’m not a lawyer, but the case against Goldman as presented to date seems weak. Who cares if Goldman thought the housing market would turn? This isn’t grounds for denying a sale or not facilitating a trade. If Goldman policy forbode them from executing securities transactions for clients because they felt one side was more likely to make money than the other, then Goldman would never execute a transactions for anyone and they’d be as out of business as their friends and Shearson Lehman.


From the information in the public domain today Goldman Sachs made all of the right moves. From an ethical perspective, I’m not convinced they did any wrong. From a public relations perspective well perhaps in today’s George Bush poisoned America it would’ve been easier and smarter to have been like the other banks and just lost their Savile Row shirts during the housing downturn.