auf dem Rolling-Stone-Artikel zu Goldman-Sachs (Kapitel Haus-Blase):
Im Gegensatz zu anderen Banken, die den Subprime-Mist teils für tatsächlich werthaltig hielten, wusste GS sehr genau, dass es sich um "grade-D-Pferdescheiße" handelte. GS war einer der aggressivsten Vermarkter und "Bündeler" von Subprime-CDOs - aber freilich erst, nachdem sichergestellt war, dass AIG "unregulierten" CDS-Versicherungsschutz gegen Ausfall bieten durfte, den GS dann auch eifrig in Anspruch nahm. Die Wette war damit sicher. Man konnte die Blase bis zum Exzess hochtreiben, und wenn sie platzte, konnte man sich das Geld bei AIG zurückholen. Leider ging AIG deshalb fast pleite, war aber "too big to fail". Es-GS-Boss Paulson konnte dann als Finanzminister das 700 Mrd. Bailout-Paket für AIG von der Regierung ertrotzen, das in hohem Maß GS selbst zugute kam.
Am unverfrorensten aber war, dass GS zu der Zeit, als es den AAA-Müll an unbedarfte Pensionsfonds und Landesbanken weiterreichte, selber short auf diese "Securities" ging (siehe unten). Abgefeimter geht es nicht...
All dies wurde bislang in keinster Weise bestraft oder geahndet. GS zahlte kürzlich die TARP-Rettungsgelder zurück und versucht nun so zu tun, als wäre "nichts gewesen" und man könne wie gewohnt weitermachen. Dabei wurde hier ganz klar Anlagebetrug - Securities Fraud - begangen.
But the story didn’t end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities – a third of which were subprime – much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.
Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006-S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation – no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody’s projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.
Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners – old people, for God’s sake – pretending the whole time that it wasn’t grade-D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. “The mortgage sector continues to be challenged,” David Viniar, the bank’s chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. “As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions …. However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable.” In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.
“That’s how audacious these assholes are,” says one hedge-fund manager. “At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb – they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing.” I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you’re actually betting against – particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer – doesn’t amount to securities fraud.