Don't Let Goldman off the Hook

The damning new Senate report proves Wall Street still can't be trusted to police itself.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Monday, April 25, 2011, at 3:44 PM ET

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With crises mounting daily—wars, deficits, debt limits, natural disasters—it's tempting to forget the cataclysms of the past. In particular, America seems to have amnesia about the Wall Street-induced catastrophe that destroyed so much of our economy. We still haven't learned its lessons, and if we don't pay attention, we're soon going to pay again for its perpetrators' callous disregard for the public interest.

The report last week issued by Sens. Carl Levin and Tom Coburn was a bipartisan indictment of Wall Street and its lead architect, Goldman Sachs. Putting the Levin-Coburn report together with the FCIC report, we now have a pretty extensive set of documents with which to understand the inner workings of a still compromised Wall Street, riddled with conflicts of interest and favoring half-truths at best when dealing with government.

I want to focus on the two most critical conclusions that jump out from these documents. The first has been remarked upon but bears repeating. The second, I do not believe has been discussed at all and is perhaps the more important.