McClatchy takes on Goldman Sachs on the eve of the New Jersey governor’s election. That can’t be helpful to former Goldman CEO, Jon Corzine. There’s no question that Goldman did the best job of hedging against a housing market collapse, nor that they received preferential treatment from Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who was himself a former CEO of the firm. They’ve returned to profitability in large part because they now have less competition. If they were too-big-to-fail before, they are even more so, now.
However, I think it is primarily their good decisions that are giving them extra scrutiny at the moment. The firms that failed committed all the same sins and deserve the same condemnation. It’s true that Paulson’s moves to rescue AIG and not to rescue Lehman Brothers helped Goldman. So did a big infusion of cash.
With the help of more than $23 billion in direct and indirect federal aid, Goldman appears to have emerged intact from the economic implosion, limiting its subprime losses to $1.5 billion. By repaying $10 billion in direct federal bailout money — a 23 percent taxpayer return that exceeded federal officials’ demand — the firm has escaped tough federal limits on 2009 bonuses to executives of firms that received bailout money.
Goldman announced record earnings in July, and the firm is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.
But it was actually the fact that Goldman, along with JP Morgan, were the healthiest firms going into the crisis that made them the vehicles for solving it. The Treasury went looking for help from those two firms because they were the only ones with enough of a pulse to buy up failing firms and avoid a complete collapse of global confidence in the financial markets.
The reason Goldman was comparatively healthy may have been because they were more clear-eyed than others about the crap they were selling in the bundled mortgage market, and they hedged against it earlier and more thoroughly than others. That doesn’t make them more guilty, in my view. It only makes them look worse. All of these firms knew that they were selling AAA-rated products as safe investments that they knew to be virtually worthless. The difference is that Goldman tooks steps to protect themselves.
The whole scheme was a form of legalized thievery and fraud. Some of it was illegal. All of it should be illegal after Congress completes its work on regulating the financial markets. But it’s become kind of a fad to conjure up conspiracy theories about Goldman Sachs and their influence on the inside of government. It’s definitely a big concern, but Goldman mainly benefitted from their status as a firm that was not collapsing, while others were. That put them in the driver’s seat more than the fact that Paulson used to work there. Spending too much time focusing on Goldman risks letting everyone else off the hook. They’re all scoundrels.
