Friday, April 16, 2010

Bill Black and Barry Ritholtz on the Goldman Sachs Fraud

Here's a good discussion on the Goldman fraud allegations. Folks, how many examples do we need to see before we realize these guys should be put out of business? When you come across a corrupt culture, there's never just one incidence of fraud. It's like the old "you can't be a little bit pregnant" saying. As Black says, if you're rotten, you're rotten to the core. Given that these types of situations take awhile to unravel, but then they just get uglier and uglier, it's beyond me why GS stock was only down 13% today. This is only the beginning. Take a look at this quote from Fabrice Tourre, the man who orchestrated this deal at Goldman. Of course, incompetence and/or irresponsibility do not necessarily equate to illegality, but I would say that there'd have to be a good chance that other of his "monstrosities" would have been illegal as well (from an Associated Press article):

In an email to the friend, he described himself as "the fabulous Fab standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!"