Crisis Commission Tells Goldman Sachs to Stop Delaying

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission slapped Goldman Sachs with a subpoena for documents and emails the bank has failed to turn over "in a timely manner," according to a press release from the Commission.

Author:: Zachery Kouwe
Updated:: Jan 14, 2019
Original:: Jun 7, 2010

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission slapped Goldman Sachs with a subpoena for documents and emails the bank has failed to turn over "in a timely manner," according to a press release from the Commission.

Not surprisingly, the news has hit Goldman shares, which were up at the start of the trading day.

“We’ve given them ample time to provide documents and information,” a commission spokesman said. “The kind of documents is quite broad, as you might imagine, so it’s not that they are just withholding a specific range of docs but more to the tune of generally uncooperative. Same with interviews.”
Phil Angelides, the commission’s chairman, and Bill Thomas, the vice chairman, are expected to discuss the subpoenas later Monday in a conference call. Both men are Californians. Mr. Angelides, a Democrat, is a former state treasurer and gubernatorial candidate; Mr. Thomas, a Republican, served 28 years in Congress and rose to be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
A person briefed on the investigation said that Goldman had already provided millions of pages of documents, and that the commission had begun interviewing witnesses, on a range of issued, including derivatives, the complex financial instruments that were at the heart of the crisis.

Financial Panel Issues a Subpoena to Goldman Sachs [NYT]

It’s fair to say that members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is pissed as hell at what it thinks are efforts by Goldman Sachs to ride out their investigation. The commission’s chairman, Phil Angelides, blasted Goldman on a conference call with the media today, after announcing the panel sent the firm a subpoena for specific documents and emails.

Wall Street Journal columnist David Weidner has some choice words for Phil Angelides and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission this morning. In short, he thinks the commission is just spinning its wheels, issuing worthless subpoenas and basically sputtering out. Perhaps they should take up Debrahlee’s cause.

Big hedge fund managers my be taking risk off the table, but Goldman Sachs remains bullish on the broader market and notes the recent pullback is totally consistent with a recovery. From the firm’s latest Kickstart report:

A retired Croatian seamstress, who allowed her nephew, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, to make illegal insider trades through her brokerage account, has won the reversal of a $5.7 million penalty she owed to the Securities and Exchange Commission because she sent her response to the allegations to the wrong address.

Goldman Sachs just revealed in an SEC filing that its traders made money on every single trading day last quarter, a record for the firm. Net revenue for trading was $25 million or higher in all of the first quarter’s 63 trading days with 35 of those days bringing in more $100 million, according to the filing.

Now, Goldman Sachs may have to deal with another lawsuit from a bunch of blokes at an Australian hedge fund. Goldman has been tussling behind the scenes with lawyers from the firm, called the Basis Yield Alpha Fund, over a $100 million slice of the Goldman-sponsored Timberwolf CDO that the Aussies bought right before the shit hit the fan.

A week ago today, a man named Greg Smith resigned from Goldman Sachs. As a sort of exit interview, Smith explained his reasons for departing the firm in a New York Times Op-Ed entitled "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs." The equity derivatives VP wrote that Goldman had "veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say I identify with what it stands for." Smith went on to note that whereas the Goldman of today is "just about making money," the Goldman he knew as a young pup "revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients." It was a culture that made him "love working for the firm" and its absence had stripped him of "pride and belief" he once held in the place. While claiming that Goldman Sachs has become virtually unrecognizable from the institution founded by Marcus (Goldman) and Samuel (Sachs), which put clients ahead of its own interests, is hardly a new argument, there was something about Smith's words that gave readers a moment's pause. He was so deeply distraught over the differences between the Goldman of 2012 and the Goldman of 2000 (when he was hired) that suggested...more. That he'd seen things. Things that had made an imprint on his soul. Things that he couldn't forget. Things that he held up in his heart for how Goldman should be and things that made it all the more difficult to ignore when it failed to live up to that ideal. Things like this: