The Great American Bubble Machine

Anyone with more than a casual interest in why their 401(k) tanked knows that it's because of the global credit crisis. It was triggered by the collapse of the housing market in the United States and magnified worldwide by the sale of complicated investments that would have been illegal, during most of the 20th century under the gaming laws; but in 2000 Congress gave Wall Street an exemption and it has turned out to be a very bad idea.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

The Great American Bubble Machine - Links Fixed

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again

This article originally appeared in RS 1082-1083 from July 9-23, 2009

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405
 
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=2

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=3

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=5

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=6

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=7

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=8

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405#ixzz1iHcQGDOh


Posted by Astrology Email at 11:34 PM

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Moyers & Company
http://billmoyers.com

How Washington made
the rich richer at
the expense of the
middle class.



The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Bloomberg's William D. Cohen asks if psychopaths have taken over Wall Street:

According to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield “considerable power.”

They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”

These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly un-bothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done.

They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own worth and value.

They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.”
Alternet Investigations - Great American Bubble Barons

Friday, April 16, 2010

SEC Sues Goldman for Fraud

A number of journalists and commentators have taken issue with the fact that some dealers (most notably Goldman and DeutscheBank) had programs of heavily subprime synthetic collateralized debt obligations which they used to take short positions. Needless to say, the firms have been presumed to have designed these CDOs so that their short would pay off, meaning that they designed the CDOs to fail. The reason this is problematic is that most investors would assume that a dealer selling a product it had underwritte was acting as a middleman, intermediating between the views of short and long investors. Having the firm act to design the deal to serve its own interests doesn’t pass the smell test (one benchmark: Bear Stearns refused to sell synthetic CDOs on behalf of John Paulson, who similarly wanted to use them to establish a short position. How often does trading oriented firm turn down a potentially profitable trade because they don’t like the ethics?)

The SEC is now mounting a civil suit against Goldman against one of its Abacus trades, which was a series of synthetic CDOs used to take short positions in real estate. Interestingly, the deal in question was on behalf of John Paulson. Greg Zuckerman’s book on subprime shorts, The Greatest Trade Ever, indicated that Paulson wanted to take down the all the credit default swaps created through the CDO issuance process (which would typically leave him 95% short the par value of the CDO, since Paulson would put up the equity tranche, usually 4-5%). The SEC may have started with this transaction because the communications between Paulson and the SEC would make it easy to show the intent, that of putting crappy CDS in the CDO.

Strange as it may seem, structured credit-related litigation is a new area of law, with few precedents. Until the credit crisis, unhappy investors seldom sued dealers and other key transaction participants.

From the New York Times:

Goldman Sachs, which emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis, was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail…

The instrument in the S.E.C. case, called Abacus 2007-AC1, was one of 25 deals that Goldman created so the bank and select clients could bet against the housing market…

As the Abacus deals plunged in value, Goldman and certain hedge funds made money on their negative bets, while the Goldman clients who bought the $10.9 billion in investments lost billions of dollars….

Goldman let Mr. [John] Paulson select mortgage bonds that he wanted to bet against [for Abacus 2007-AC1] — the ones he believed were most likely to lose value — and packaged those bonds into Abacus 2007-AC1, according to the S.E.C. complaint. Goldman then sold the Abacus deal to investors like foreign banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other hedge funds.

But the deck was stacked against the Abacus investors, the complaint contends, because the investment was filled with bonds chosen by Mr. Paulson as likely to default. Goldman told investors in Abacus marketing materials reviewed by The Times that the bonds would be chosen by an independent manager.

Mr. Paulson is not being named in the lawsuit.

Update 11:30 AM. The complaint is here. Reading through it quickly, the SEC is seeking to apply traditional securities law standards (the overarching charge is “making materially misleading statements and omissions in connection with a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (“CDO”) GS&Co structured and marketed to investors,” with the key issue being that John Paulson’s role in having a significant influence in the selection of the collateral was not disclosed:

After participating in the selection of the reference portfolio, Paulson effectively shorted the RMBS portfolio it helped select by entering into credit default swaps (“CDS”) with GS&Co to buy protection on specific layers of the ABACUS 2007-AC1 capital structure. Given its financial short interest, Paulson had an economic incentive to choose RMBS that it expected to experience credit events in the near future.

This is also interesting because Paulson appears not to have bought the CDS created to serve as collateral for the transaction, but instead shorted (via Goldman) some of the tranches. We’ve been told that shorting CDO tranches (as opposed to shorting BBB supbrime bonds) was pretty uncommon, but “pretty uncommon” may not be quite as rare as we had been told. Later in the complaint, we get further detail:

Paulson discussed with GS&Co the creation of a CDO that would allow Paulson to participate in selecting a portfolio of reference obligations and then effectively short the RMBS portfolio it helped select by entering into CDS with GS&Co to buy protection on specific layers of the synthetic CDO’s capital structure.

Paulson could have simply taken down all the CDS in the deal and achieved the same result. But Goldman itself may have taken down the CDS (a New York Times story on the Abacus program suggested as much), or the swaps could have gone to other clients. Presumably, doing it this way was more attractive to Goldman (arranging a short on a CDO tranche has to have been a higher fee event), but I’m a bit perplexed as to how this mechanism would have been to Paulson’s advantage (unless the shorts on the lower-rated CDO tranches, which would fail first, hence assuring Paulson a faster time to profit realization).

It is also interesting that the SEC is suing Goldman and one of its employees, and not the collateral manager, ACA Management:

Fabrice Tourre [a Goldman employee who is a party to the SEC suit] also misled ACA into believing that Paulson invested approximately $200 million in the equity of ABACUS 2007-AC1 (a long position) and, accordingly, that Paulson’s interests in the collateral section process were aligned with ACA’s when in reality Paulson’s interests were sharply conflicting.

http://tinyurl.com/y9md6dr
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/17goldman.html?hp
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2010/comp-pr2010-59.pdf
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/04/sec-sues-goldman-for-fraud.html
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