Some of you might have missed this but yesterday a scathing report was issued by a Senate panel in which it accuses Goldman Sachs of misleading clients and manipulating markets. The report also condemned greed, weak regulation and conflicts of interest throughout the financial system. Please tell us something that we didn’t already know.
Huffington Post: Goldman Sachs executives deceived clients in order to profit off the brewing financial crisis and then misled Congress when asked to explain their actions, concluded a top lawmaker who led a two-year investigation into Wall Street's role in the meltdown.
Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, will recommend that Goldman executives who testified before his panel, including chairman and chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, be referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, the Michigan Democrat announced Wednesday. Members of the subcommittee will now deliberate Levin's proposal.
The investigation found a "financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing," Levin said.
More than any other government report produced in the wake of the crisis, this account names names, blaming specific people and institutions: Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual, Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's, the Office of Thrift Supervision and others. It targets four types of institutions, all of which it says played key roles in causing the crisis: mortgage lenders that offered prospective homeowners booby-trapped loans; regulators that were paid by the institutions they were regulating and cooperated in widespread deception; rating agencies that gave seals of approval to products they knew to be especially risky, all in the pursuit of market share; and Wall Street banks that duped investors into buying securities that only the insiders knew were destined to go bad.
Levin said his investigators found 3,400 instances of Goldman officials using the phrase "net short" in the documents they reviewed. He intimated that Goldman likely used the phrase many more times in other documents not reviewed by his panel.
Asked about the general lack of prosecutions of high-powered Wall Street executives, Levin replied: "There is still time."
"Hope springs eternal," he added with a smile"
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