A ghastly day on Capitol Hill for Goldman Sachs’s top brass

“ONE of the worst days of my professional life” was Lloyd Blankfein’s characterisation of April 16th, when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs. The bank and an employee were accused of failing to disclose that a hedge fund that had influenced the composition of a complex mortgage-debt transaction was also shorting it. April 27th was surely not much better, either for the Wall Street firm’s boss or any of the six other current and former Goldman investment bankers who testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The roasting, which lasted more than ten hours, was as dramatic as any hearing focused largely on synthetic collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs) could be.

Goldman’s persecutor-in-chief was the panel’s chairman, Carl Levin. The gruff Democrat went beyond the SEC’s complaint, accusing the firm of having concocted several deals, not just one, to profit from the collapse of the housing market, and also of being riddled with “inherent conflicts of interest.” Not content merely to skewer America’s pre-eminent investment house, the senator harrumphed that its conduct “calls into question the whole function of Wall Street”—a market that, while supposedly free, “isn’t free of self-dealing.” His attack rested, in part, on internal Goldman e-mails. In one, a senior executive described a Goldman-underwritten CDO as “one shitty deal”. In another, a colleague applauded the structured-products team for making “lemonade from some big old lemons.” …