Apparently Goldman Sachs is cooperating and as Brad Hintz said yesterday, shouldn’t be worried about a thing.
Carl Levin
When the Sanford Bernstein analyst closes his eyes, he pictures Lloyd and Co going out of their way to get on Carl Levin’s good side, possibly going so far as to praise his work. Continue reading »
Senator Carl “Shitty Deal” Levin has blasted the Swiss government for withholding the names of certain UBS clients suspected of opening Swiss bank accounts to evade U.S. taxes. The Swiss lower house voted today to reject a U.S.-Swiss treaty that would have forced UBS to turn over 4,450 out of the 52,000 UBS clients Uncle Sam suspects of tax evasion.
“Rejection of the treaty is an international embarrassment that can be laid at the feet of Swiss legislators who are willing to continue to allow their banks to facilitate U.S. tax evasion,” Levin said in a statement. Continue reading »
*5:33 – LB: “I don’t think our clients care nor should they care” about whether Goldman is short something. “You could have the biggest mutual fund in the world selling stock and you wouldn’t know it
Carl: “This is a shitty deal, this is crap, what you think about that.”
LB: “We are selling securities all the time that we don’t like” but people just want to buy things.
*5:41 – LB and Carl Levin go back and forth and back and forth on what being a market maker is and whether anyone care if Goldman is short something it was selling to someone else.
Carl: You’re selling, then shorting. LB: We’re buying and selling all the time.
Carl: “I wouldn’t trust you if you came to me trying to sell something.”
LB: The buyer doesn’t care. They don’t give a crap that we’re betting against this stuff.
*5:46 – John McCain pops in despite the fact he’s been gone the entire day. Asks Lloyd why he thinks Goldman needed the TARP money.
LB – “We were brought in” and had no choice but to take the gov’t money.
McCain – Brings up shorting the residential mortgage market. LB says they made $500 million in revenue in 2007, but “did not make big money.” McCain slips up and says “you took Pork, I mean TARP money.”
*5:52 – Has Goldman done anything, McCain asks, to help community banks and homeowners pay their bills? LB: “We delivered $1 billion of the firm’s money to philanthropy” with $500 million to help small businesses. “Are any of these things enough? Not for the suffering existing in the world, but we are trying to do our part.”
Emails between the Office of Thrift Supervision and the FDIC over the issue of who can do what with regards to Washington Mutual in 2008 are particularly fierce. Carl Levin, chairman of the subcommittee investigating the collapse of WaMu, called it a “turf battle.”
At the Senate hearing today, John Reich, former director of OTS, explained it this way: “Rome was burning” and “Blood pressure was running high.” Levin said: “I don’t see your blood pressure getting up over a bank that was engaged in dangerous practices.” Continue reading »
Uh oh. Carl Levin is getting feisty at the WaMu hearing.
He’s bashing former WaMu CEO Kerry Kiilinger for not answering a question about whether he would have been troubled had he seen some emails between other WaMu execs about high delinquencies of mortgages that were making their way into the bank’s securitized products. Continue reading »
In the first day of Senate testimony on the collapse of Washington Mutual, we learn the bank knew about rampant mortgage fraud going on in its various branch offices. The fraud includes the typical shenanigans like lying on income statements of borrowers, fake employment statements, etc. Continue reading »
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