Saturday, Jul 12th
Last update08:03:16 AM GMT
Economic Glance
In December 2006, Goldman Sachs embarked on a frantic effort to shed billions of dollars in risky mortgage securities and purchase exotic insurance to protect itself against what it had concluded could be the collapse of America's housing market.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted the central bank created $1.3 trillion out of thin air to buy mortgage backed securities. This shocking admission came from the Joint Economic Committee hearing on Capital Hill last week. I was dumbfounded when I saw Bernanke shake his head in the affirmative as Representative Ron Paul said, “Well, where did you get the money? You created this money. So you did monetize debt, and that went into the banking system.” I was amazed he admitted this. I looked up the original hearing on C-Span to make sure the clip was not edited. It was not.
The stark admission – made by the bank's chairman at the end of a more than nine-hour marathon hearing before the US Senate – came in spite of his assertion that "I think people trust us" as he tried to fend off accusations that Goldman inflated the US housing bubble.
The documents show that the firm's executives were celebrating earlier investments calculated to benefit if housing prices fell, a Senate investigative committee found. In an e-mail sent in the fall of 2007, for example, Goldman executive Donald Mullen predicted a windfall because credit-rating companies had downgraded mortgage-related investments, which caused losses for investors.
"Sounds like we will make some serious money," Mullen wrote.
A Senate investigation into the financial crisis has found that Goldman Sachs, the storied Wall Street investment bank, sought to profit from the historic decline in housing prices by betting against the U.S. mortgage market. The documents show that Goldman, at times, made big, profitable bets against the housing market -- sometimes betting against mortgage investments that it had sold to investors.
A Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation's financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages in exchange for lucrative fees.
The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers' colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud. Friday's announcement that the world's most famous investment bank, Goldman Sachs, is to face civil charges for fraud brought by the American regulator is but the latest of a series of investigations that have been launched, arrests made and charges made against financial institutions around the world. Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud. Yet Britain, centre of the world financial system, has not yet levelled charges against any bank; all that we've seen is the allegation of a high-level insider dealing ring which, embarrassingly, involves a banker advising the government. We have to live with the fiction that our banks and bankers are whiter than white, and any attempt to investigate them and their institutions will lead to a mass exodus to the mountains of Switzerland. The politicians of the Labour and Tory party alike are Bambis amid the wolves.
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