Matt Taibbi: The 'Big Short' and Goldman's New Story

[marmar]

from Rolling Stone:



POSTED: June 9, 11:01 AM ET | By Matt Taibbi
The 'Big Short' and Goldman's New Story


One more thing I wanted to point about about Andrew Ross Sorkin’s story defending Goldman Sachs and Lloyd Blankfein the other day, in which it was posited that Goldman did not, in fact, have a “Big Short” in 2007. Sorkin says that according to Goldman, the firm’s net short position that summer may have been as low as $5 billion, and not $16 billion as claimed, therefore Lloyd Blankfein was not lying when he told the Senate, “We did not have a massive short bet.”

Given that Sorkin was apparently given access to a large trove of documents allowing him to make the case that Goldman didn’t have that “Big Short” on, I thought it would be instructive for readers to see what kind of answers the Senate got when it asked Goldman executives the same questions about the size of the banks’ short bet. They gave Sorkin the whole store, but Levin’s committee basically got name, rank, serial number, and a big legalese "eat me."

See if you can notice some consistencies in the following statements.

The committee, for instance, asked David Viniar, the bank’s Chief Financial Officer, to explain what he meant in an email exchange between himself and bank president Gary Cohn in the summer of 2007, when Cohn told Viniar that the bank’s Structured Products Group (where most of the dicey deals covered in the Levin report were made) made $373 million, while the CDO-CLO desk lost $230 million and the residential credit desk lost $92 million. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-big-short-and-goldmans-new-story-20110609

[TacticalPeek]

1. Taibbi deserves a journamalism award for his coverage of the Great Debacle.

K&R

:kick:

[xiamiam]

2. agreed..wish someone in the administration would read his articles..nt

[DirkGently]

3. This guy's becoming one of the big post-bubble heros. Keep it up, Matt.