By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant
Posted on June 22, 2009, Printed on June 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140806/
Anyone else out there find himself doubled over laughing after reading Goldman, Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein's "apology" for his bank's behavior leading up to the financial crisis? Has an act of contrition ever in history been more worthless and insincere? Even Gary Ridgway did a better job of sounding genuinely sorry at his sentencing hearing -- and he was a guy who had sex with dead prostitutes because it was cheaper than paying live ones.
Looking at Blankfein's one-sentence apology, I'm struck in particular by a couple of phrases:
While we regret that we participated in the market euphoria...
Really, Lloyd? You "participated" in the market euphoria? You didn't, I don't know, cause the market euphoria? By almost any measurement, Goldman was a central, leading player in the subprime housing bubble story. Just yesterday I was talking to Guy Cecala at Inside Mortgage Finance, the trade publication that tracks statistics in the mortgage lending industry. He said that at the height of the boom, in 2006, Goldman Sachs underwrote $76.5 billion in mortgage-backed securities, or 7% of the entire market. Of that $76.5 billion, $29.3 billion was subprime, which is bad enough -- but another $29.8 billion was what's called "Alt-A" paper. Alt-A mortgages are characterized, mainly, by crappy documentation and lack of equity: no income verification, no asset verification, little-to-no cash down. So while "only" 38% of the mortgage-backed securities Goldman underwrote were subprime, more than three-fourths of their securities were what is called "non-prime," ie either subprime or Alt-A. "There's a lot of crap in there too," says Cecala.
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