If hubris is a commodity, Wall Street’s ‘vampire squid’ has a very long position

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

There’s a distinct whiff of unfinished business about the current assault on Goldman Sachs, which stands accused of fraud by the US Securities & Exchange Commission and of ‘moral bankruptcy’ by Gordon Brown — you know, that Scottish bloke who sometimes stands on platforms quite close to Nick Clegg. When the leading Wall Street investment bank was dubbed last year ‘a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’ by Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, the phrase resonated around the global blogosphere: everyone knew exactly what he meant. Goldman has long been regarded by many politicians, regulators and market participants (excluding, of course, those in all walks of life who made their first fortunes working for Goldman) as too powerful and arrogant for its own or anyone else’s good.

When Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail in September 2008, there was a belief in some quarters that Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, Goldman’s ex-chairman, let Lehman go partly in order to conserve bail-out ammunition for a rescue of his own former firm if needed; now allegations have surfaced that Goldman helped cripple Lehman, its fourth-ranking competitor, by short-selling Lehman shares. Whatever the truth of all that, more resentment was provoked when Goldman became the first bank to repay Paulson’s TARP (‘troubled assets relief program’) funding and to declare that it never needed help in the first place; incredulity was added to resentment when the current Goldman chief, Lloyd Blankfein, told a journalist last autumn that he was merely ‘doing God’s work’. Plans to pay out £3.5 billion in bonuses connected to this week’s announcement of bumper first-quarter profits have made matters worse. If hubris is a tradable commodity, Goldman Sachs has a dangerously long position in it.

But what of the substance of the fraud accusations, which Goldman folk dismiss as ‘political’? The bank is alleged to have colluded with the New York hedge-fund manager John Paulson in the creation of ‘synthetic collateralised debt obligations’ (CDOs, a particularly toxic form of mortgage-backed paper) that Paulson believed were likely to end up worthless as a result of subprime defaults.