For a second time yesterday, all the Senate Republicans + Ben Nelson were able to block the financial regulation reform bill from coming to a vote in the Senate. On the same day, however, Goldman Sachs was busy giving an assist to financial reform by getting grilled by a Senate committee. Carl Levin chewed up and spit out a Goldman Sachs executive for knowingly and aggresively selling a product that Goldman salespeople internally called a “shitty deal.”
Goldman Sachs is in some trouble now for internally betting for failure of the CDOs they were selling to external customers. Several times Goldman executives said they didn’t think they did anything wrong and they didn’t feel any regret for their actions. Just take a look at what one of their stars, the genius boy wonder “The Fabulous Fab” Fabricio Tourre said in an email:
“…More and more leverage in the system, the entire system is about to crumble any moment…the only potential survivor the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous abt me…) standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities !!!“
They knew what they were doing and they didn’t care. As long as they got their payday. It makes me ill that these guys got their goverment bailout, kept their jobs and have gone back to paying themselves extravagant bonuses for screwing up.
We can’t really do much about the past. Hopefully the SEC and the FBI will be able to find and punish corporations who did things illegally. I fear the real scandal is that all this is legal. That’s why we desperately need reform – so we don’t end up with the same suicide bargain that we faced in 2008.
Keith Olbermann ran this story last night on Countdown and included an interview with Delaware’s own Ted Kaufman. The rest of the country is discovering what a gem we have.
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