Goldman Sachs Will Pay $5B to Settle Financial-Crisis Claims
npr.org
npr.org
No execs (or anybody else) go to Jail
Continues to do business as usual
Pays a small fraction of its profits in fines (but gets to keep the multi-billions of tax-payer money under various govt. programs)
Admits to no wrong doing
Basically a speeding-ticket that gets dismissed when you pony up the cash after being caught drunk driving with dead body stuck on your fender.
Most of the activities the banks were carrying out that contributed to the crash were well known long before the crash, and were not illegal and they weren't being called out for it. In fact many politicians and the public were keen for broader availability of cheap loans. So yes, we need better regulation of financial institutions, but there were many causes of the financial crisis and blame lies in many places and many lessons learned, but you can't apply laws retroactively or arbitrarily.
In an attempt to accomplish this, Elizabeth Warren has drafted a reasonable, 21st century take [1] on Glass-Steagall, which Senator Sanders supports.
[1] http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/21stCenturyGlas...
This is not something which occurred during the GFC. We saw:
1) A significant number of pure retail banks making bad home loans, failing, and losing their depositors money. (Eg, Countrywide.)
2) A small number of pure investment banks (or in one famous case, an insurance company) getting on the wrong side of volatile markets or making exotic bets that went bad, and losing their investors money. (Eg, Lehman.)
3) A number of diversified banks which got into trouble on one side or the other, but were able to weather the storm without significant losses. (Eg, Citi.)
What we did NOT see is any large banks which got into trouble on the investment side, and lost money on the deposit side.
2) The Insurance company you allude to is likely AIG, who decided to provide industry wide insurance for the CDO which were themselves intended to distribute risk, which basically de-distributed the risk by rolling it up under their own single company. Lehman Brothers was a victim of apparent politics as to why they weren't bailed out while others were?
3) Citi required $20 Billion in taxpayer assistance via TARP. I don't know about you but that doesn't sound like weathering the storm.
I don't think you really understood what happened or have a very clear idea of the facts of the situation given your stated points.
2) AIG was not doing anything that Glass-Steagall would prevent. The fact that your 20/20 hindsight says it created a systematic risk doesn't change this.
3) Citi received $20B in TARP money, and paid it back quite rapidly. It's unknown how much in needed - many banks were forced to take unnecessary money in order to prevent identification of which banks were in trouble.
Also, why do you believe that preventing Citi from mixing retail and investment banking together would have prevented the (hypothetical multiple pieces of) city from requiring $20B?
1) Countrywide's primary business was mortgage lending, and it would have fallen on the retail side of the Glass-Steagall wall.
2) AIG had no retail banking, and would have fallen on the non-retail side of the wall.
3) Citi did not require the funds; banks were required to take TARP funds whether they needed them or not in order to avoid giving recipients a stigma. It later became clear that Citi (like other large integrated banks) did not need the funds, and they repaid them in full, with interest.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. The Glass-Steagall wall split banks up into the kind of retail bank that fell over during the GFC and the kind of non-retail bank that ell over during the GFC, and banned the kind of integrated banks which survived the GFC. It would not have stopped either what Countrywide did, nor what Lehman did; it would have stopped what Citi did. Do you dispute any part of that?
Have fun competing in the global financial business with massive institutions from other countries.
Edit: removed a unintended global
\* Specific numbers obviously made up for illustrative purposes only.
If this were true, then the US banks should have weathered the financial crisis far better than Canada's (highly consolidated). That's the complete opposite of reality.
I don't care much for efficiency when it allows for the penalty-free violation of the law. Efficiency isn't the end all, be all metric.
I would support a legislation that says no bailout money to any private company ever. If something is too big too fail the investors would shy away from investing into it.
GS uses the capital to buy government bonds with governments own money to make literally riskless profit."
I have zero sources for this, so if I'm wrong please say
The reason some banks started using the money from those programs to buy up government debt, is to make their books more solid, or in other words, make the money market believe that they won't go bankrupt any time soon and start lending them money again. For example, if I have $5000 and bet all of it on horse races, and then immediately ask you to loan me $100 more, you'd be sceptical. If, on the other hand, I bet $2500 on horse racing, put the other $2500 in a deposit box, and ask you to loan me $100 for cab fare, the deal would seem a bit more solid, right?
There is another argument, that international banks profited hugely from the AIG bailout, and that the bankers were unprofessional for not foreseeing a possible AIG collapse. That is only partially true. Yes, the bailout money allowed AIG to honour its contracts with the banks.
But AIG was an insurance company and the things it sold to banks (Credit Default Swaps) were insurance against selected companies going bust. For example, if I loan Apple 50 billion dollars, I want to insure the whole deal for the very slim chance Apple goes bust. In 2008 a lot of companies started to go bust, hence AIG had to pay out a lot. So much, in fact, that it would go bankrupt.
If I change the words, and say that American machinery manufacturers insured their factories against possible fires with insurance company A, but due some freak accident all the factories started burning, so the government had to step in and bail out company A, so they could pay out the insurance policies. Doesn't seem so preposterous, does it?
___
[1] - https://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/TAR...
If only they would have put you on the case instead of Federal investigators, I'm sure all of these alleged crimes would have been proven to a legal standard, I suppose?
Business as usual? The banking sector has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs, paid billions in fines, faces increased scrutiny and the executives have been pilloried without crimes being proven.
I wish I could go back in time to 2001 when Hacker News was calling for the heads of VC firms and tech-stock CEOs for perpetuating a fraud on the people and causing a financial crash. But that didn't really happen; instead many people when to work for them.
2) banks jump on the wagon, just as any other business would do having similar chance in their field
3) plenty of folks are plain math-stupid, lending as much as they can and trying even more for outright stupid reasons (ie TV, cars etc.) on top of other loans they already have, usually for housing
4) SHTF, since economy is never stable and we have cycles and whatnot
5) blame the banks, who cares about Clinton's administration allowing and pushing for this in first place. easy part.
the topic is of course more complex, ie derivative trading is/was in some cases pure evil, but that's another topic.
Btw, correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't the money just lended and now it's (being) paid back, maybe even with interest?
How government encouraging something free a business of their responsibility of lending money following good business practices?
How is derivatives another topic? Is not this the real problem?
The money could be paid back, but, as in any investment we should take into account the opportunity cost of that investment. Instead of helping people they are saving banks. Is not there a very strong moral hazard?
Instead of saving big private entities because their fall would crash the world, what if we follow the fashion and start implementing micro-services?
Even if this is the case, if my business is a bank, how can I forget about risk assessment just because I could get treated differently by regulators? Is it not my duty to think in what will happen in the next recession? would not be the best action to initiate legal complains? do you know of any legal action initiated by banks because of that?
It seems to me that the simplest explanation is greed.
Somehow, after all we have seen, we try to exculpate the business and throw the guilt in the government. It's a little tiresome.
Derivates being another topic - just to topic of people getting loans beyond their means, overall it's the same crysis topic, and I think we agree that there is no good justification from banks for this part.
Why banks were saved - apart from dirty business of bribery and lobbying which is sad daily part of political existence, there is part about something along: john doe has some money in the bank, this bank goes bust, and he loses it all. There is a chance of getting some % of it in future in settlements, but nothing guaranteed. In that situation, no politician would willingly go there if they can avoid it. It's too easy to start pointing on them, and everybody takes it badly if they lose money because of somebody else's mistake.
What happened in the banks - bonuses, based only on last year's performance. Source of a good deal of evil roaming banking (and trading too). It means many pushing for short-term gains, not caring about broader or longer effects. People are clever, they want to maximize their own gain within boundaries set, and these things are set like this. Nobody works in banking for the passion for the job, everybody is in for the money involved, and an occasional feel of some power/influence (however pathetic this is, some people are wired like that).
It's quite tacky to name individuals who "should be in prison" without the benefit of all the facts that Gov investigators have. But it's safe to say if a "mid level" guy like Tourre was found guilty, that he was just an actor (w/knowledge) but there must be others more responsible for the fraud.
According to wikipedia, Citi and Merrill were both fined for this. I don't know who was held legally accountable for misusing shareholder money but there was the worldcom fraud which ended in jail sentences.
Honest question: do reasonable really look at the The Great Recession and think that there are "individuals" wholly responsible for what happened?
Regardless of punishing those guilty or not (which I think they should be), it's absolutely criminal that virtually nothing has changed in how these companies operate, and that the "too big to fail" companies continue to remain too big to fail. The next time these banks crash - and they will crash - the taxpayers will have to bail them out in the trillions of dollars.
Except that this is simply not true if you've been paying attention beyond the populist headlines.
Yes, that is how we handle complex issues. We look at the people who did the biggest wrong and hold them responsible for most if not all of the blame, even though we understand that there were far more actors who could've greatly impacted the actual harm done. Consider child abuse. There are certain forms where, depending upon reactions from parents and therapy offered, the outcome could vary greatly from extremely harmful to minimal damage to the child. But regardless of the outcome of the harm, and regardless if the outcome was influenced by other parties, we place the guilt of all the harm, both realized and risked, on the one who committed the abuse. We do not need mastery of how the financial system broke to deal out punishment just like we don't need mastery of the pathways by which emotional abuse leads to suicide attempts to punish the abuser.
It isn't perfect, but it is better than just washing our hands after slapping a few wrists when we don't understand all the details.
I realize this might be what you are saying already, but to be clear: tt should be /multiples/ of the bonuses they made, if you want to discourage this kind of behavior.
Things are priced at what they will sell for. It's more that they were hiding information about the risk (which of course would have drastically lowered the value and the price people would be willing to pay). I think the difference is significant, however.
they weren't priced correctly is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and synonymous with they lied about their level of risk.
If you pay me $50k for a BMW, and I deliver a Honda, the problem isn't that $50k is the wrong price for a BMW.
BUT - and this is pretty important - the ratings agencies were negligent in their rating methodology. Intelligent buyers could see the problems.
The book The Big Short covers this in some detail.
Please explain how they were "hiding" the risk.
Risk is unknown ex ante. Nobody knows the value of it. It is the responsibility of those buying the risk to have an estimate and price the security accordingly, ahead of time.
They mixed mortgages which were extremely unlikely to be repaid into packages with enough AAA rated mortgages so that they would meet the credit-rating agencies policy of rating mixed packages as AAA if a certain proportion were AAA.
However, these bonds would be valueless if any of the securities that made them up defaulted.
They sold the packaged bonds a AAA-rated securities without disclosing the likelihood that they would default.
Yes, this was stupid of the ratings agencies
Yes, the buyers should not have bought things they didn't completely understand.
But GS deliberately obfuscated the nature of what they were selling.
Risk is unknown ex ante.
That isn't entirely true. On this example specifically, it's pretty easy to see that if a household can just afford mortgage payments at a discounted rate it is pretty likely they won't be able to afford it when the discounted rate expires.
There is no such thing as a AAA mortgage. AAA is a rating for bonds and other fixed income securities.
However, these bonds would be valueless if any of the securities that made them up defaulted.
This is not how a CDO works.
They sold the packaged bonds a AAA-rated securities without disclosing the likelihood that they would default.
Why don't you show us the CDO prospectus you allege doesn't do this? Once you produce it, I'll show you the exact (mandatory) table where it's done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligation
Your comment is the financial equivalent of "The NSA is hacking my pixels in order to break the rot13 encryption." The words kind of suggest computing/finance, but anyone who knows what the words mean recognizes that the content is nonsense.
This is an easy claim to make after the fact.
>However, these bonds would be valueless if any of the securities that made them up defaulted.
Not true at all. The bonds didn't become valueless. In fact, many of these bonds were purchased by the Fed, who made money off them. The issue was CDS' being triggered on defaulting mortgage bonds.
>They sold the packaged bonds a AAA-rated securities without disclosing the likelihood that they would default.
Did they not? Have you read the prospectus'?
Look, I'm sure there were many criminal actions here. But the uninformed, populist overreaction to the financial crisis by people who are unwilling to take personal responsibility is sad.
Brokers don't owe you shit other than not lying to or defrauding you. But people don't realize this. Brokers are salesmen, pure and simple.
Worse, now brokers often have bullshit titles that hide their nature. For example, financial advisers sound like someone who has a fiduciary duty to you, but really they are just brokers. Trying to sell you on investments.
You should treat anyone who doesn't have an explicit fiduciary duty to you as you would a car salesman.
Strangely enough, it is both a kind of freedom ideal to some, and an unfair, immoral and violent dog-eat-dog society for other.
Maybe this topic isn't fit for "quick" refreshers. Some problems are more nuanced and complex.
>these guys sold CDOs that they knew weren't priced correctly, obfuscated the mispricing
What does that even mean?
>then profited on short positions against the securities.
What is the crime?
If you rip off "widows and orphans" though you will get punished severely.
They've had eight years to literally make bank on the proceeds.
Suppose that when you caught a thief the sentence were to return 60% of whatever he has stolen, nothing else. The result is quite obvious. Even if it where 100%, it will still be a good business as you will get away with all the money when you are not caught.
Lloyd said it quite clear "We are pleased to have reached an agreement in principle to resolve these matters,". Of course they are pleased! We are not.
"Overall, Goldman Sachs received a $12.9 billion payout from the government's bailout of AIG, which was at one time the world's largest insurance company." [1]
Now, these might be related, but [not] identical - or indeed not connected - but on the face of it it seems rather outrageous... perhaps someone who's a bit more up on the details can comment?
[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2010...
We seem to revisit the crisis on HN. Someone should do a write up. We seem to rehash a lot of this. Basically , history just repeating itself. TARP, for example, being a loan:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Progra...
That's a pretty sweet deal for Goldman?
Does remind me to keep "Swimming With Sharks" on my reading list:
http://www.amazon.com/Swimming-Sharks-Journey-World-Bankers-...
(I assume the Book has more along the lines of what's in this interview/promo-piece):
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/30/how-the-bank...
"Two Goldman traders, Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum, are credited with being responsible for the firm's large profits during the crisis.[18][19] The pair, members of Goldman's structured products group in New York, made a profit of $4 billion by "betting" on a collapse in the sub-prime market, and shorting mortgage-related securities."[1]
Two tradesmen made this in less than one year. I wouldn't be surprised if it's an order of magnitude less that the whole firm made through the whole period of the crisis.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Actions_in_the_2...
Convict them of 4 similar crimes and you wipe out a year's profit! I don't think GS takes a 25% drop in profits lightly.
Now in this case it sounds like they caused a lot of damage for what they did.
Edit to add:
For a specific Goldman Sachs context, see for example: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/sep/26/us-regulator...
Maybe there's some reason I missed that this didn't make a bigger or longer-lasting splash.
> "The consumer relief will be in the form of principal forgiveness for underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers; financing for construction, rehabilitation and preservation of affordable housing; and support for debt restructuring, foreclosure prevention and housing quality improvement programs, as well as land banks."
The principal forgiveness had to happen anyway in the normal course of business, one way or another. If underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers owe you a billion dollars, that does not mean that those mortgages and loans are worth a billion dollars in reality. At best you can realistically hope to eventually be repaid 60% of that (to pick an arbitrary number), given that these are distressed borrowers we're talking about. So writing down those assets in your books to e.g. $600 million dollars does NOT constitute a penalty or consumer relief of $400 million, since your assets were not really worth a billion to begin with and probably haven't been for years.
Same for the rest of the "relief", for example foreclosure prevention is almost always a net positive for the lender. Finding a way for the owner to stay in the house, look after it, and keep repaying whatever they can afford, will usually recoup more money for the bank than a distressed sale at auction (how foreclosed properties are usually sold).
Principal relief for homeowners who are above water and up to date with mortgage payments, now that would be an actual penalty
I'm hardly a defender of Goldman, but that's a bizarre characterization.
What do you think Goldman did to cause RBS's failures, exactly?
RBS (along with most buyers) didn't realize that the AAA-rated securities they bought were actually subprime-backed (because of completely stupid rules by the ratings agencies, which Goldman exploited)
When people suddenly discovered what a disaster these were, RBS wrote down £5.9bn, and was forced to seek additional capital[2].
RBS was responsible for heir own fate of course. But Goldman sure made money out of it.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/recession/5025115/RBS-tra...
> But Goldman sure made money out of it.
How? Exactly?
Where is that $3.26 billion of cash going? I know you're going to say the SEC, the DOJ, or some other [combinations of] government entity. I get that. But then where does it go? It seems that people often forget that when this happens, there's still a human that sees a $3.26 billion uptick in the amount of money he controls (though it's possibly divided between branches/depts).
What does that guy do with it? Build a (few dozen) new office building(s)? Hire 10k more employees for the agency that employs him (only 50 of which are his family and friends collecting 250% of their market rate)? Does he keep it in a bank account and collect interest on it? Send it into a black hole somewhere in the Treasury so that it can help pay off "the national debt"? Spend it on contractors? Bonuses for himself and the other people who helped "take the bad guys down"? Motorboats? Yachts?
People act like it's just an inherent truth that fined money is better off on a bureaucrat's desk than a banker's. Is that really real life?
I think almost any idea is a better idea than that.
>It sounds like you're trying to make a "taxes are theft" argument against fines for committing theft which is pretty hard to take seriously.
I'm not making an argument that taxes are theft. I'm really just trying to illustrate that while there may not be an institutional profit motive for governmental bureaus, there is a personal and/or professional profit motive for whoever gets to spend that money. A lot of young people seem to think that it's always better to have the government providing a service because "they care about more than just profit" or something similar.
Moving the money between a third-party contractor that provides a service bought by the government into the actual government itself doesn't necessarily mean anything good is going to happen. You don't have to look very far, either into the past or into the map, to see that; in many countries, the absolute richest people are politicians and bureaucrats.
It's a lot easier to fire a contractor that does a bad job than it is to replace a government bureau that does a bad job. I think it's important to convey that bureaucrats can and sometimes do still get a large amount of money, and that can affect their motives and decisions just as easily as it can for anyone else. These positions deserve scrutiny and oversight too. The people running the private sector are not that different from the people running public services.
Okay I'll take that as a "no", then.
Again, this is a fine, not even a tax. Whatever ethical considerations are bothering you about levying fines for corporate criminal behavior are not going to be addressed by handing over the fines to some third party instead, or whatever you're going on about.
Frankly, they could take the money collected from the fine and launch it into a heliocentric orbit, for all I care, because the primary aim of levying the fine in the first place i.e. as a punishment for criminal behavior is still achieved.
>"We are pleased to have reached an agreement in principle to resolve these matters," said Lloyd C. Blankfein...
All you really need to know.
Why isn't this insurance fraud?
(1) home loans (2) rating agencies like Moodies (3) AIG
I expect a similar amount of change in the underlying behavior.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20090110184334/http://www.uiowa.e...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20090207100935/http://cop.senate....
The government got back more money than it loaned out? Does that qualify as an accounting trick now?
Here's an accounting trick for you. Why don't you give me a $1000 loan for twenty years, and since you don't know me, the risk of default is, let's say, pretty high. I'll repay you $1001 in 2036—heck, just to be generous, I'll do it in inflation-adjusted dollars. When I do that, I will be happy to have you tell me about the "profit" that you made off of your investment.
No one's making value judgements about that, it's just a statement of undeniably true fact. That is the literal definition of profit, and the US government made a profit on the loan.
Please see any [1] of [2] these [3] to understand why it isn't as simple as "Y - X > 0", considering things like where the repayments are coming from, comparing the nominal annualized return to Treasury bond rates, all the fraud that will never be accounted for, etc., etc. Even pro-bailout articles [4] have to include weasel phrases like "on a risk-adjusted basis, even [such and such proposed Y - X] isn’t that big a profit, given the huge downside the government had," speaking directly to my point of how it's hard to properly account for risk, which is what any other lender would have done. Arguably, since there weren't any competitors to the US government for providing bailout money, the interest rate we use to judge whether it was "profitable" should be sky high.
[1]: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395822/overselling-tar...
[2]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/tarp-profit-a-myth_...
[3]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/04/25/dont-b...
[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bailout-high...
Because that's a fact, and not an opinion. You seem to be equating a lot of "is" with "should", and I'm not dealing at all in the "should". It is a fact of this universe that the US government made a profit off of the bailout, not mater how many links you provide (that don't provide a contrary point of view).
I'm trying to tell you that your chosen definition of "profitable" is utterly meaningless in a discussion of economics, but you have completely closed your mind to this idea. You don't seem to understand inflation, interest rates, opportunity cost, or the difference between accounting profit and economic profit [1]. Therefore, I can't proceed with this conversation.
[1]: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...