Randomly Noted

As grotesque as Goldman Sachs’ culture evidently was, it’s hard to see the Goldman bankers as black-hat-wearing villains. Whether hailing from France (Fabrice Tourre) or the U.S. or elsewhere, they’re the boys-next-door who went to college and often business school, and landed at the world’s most prestigious, powerful investment bank. There, they created and peddled an alphabet-soup of financial products, and this trade contributed to the economic crisis just as American homeowners who had no business owning homes did. Listening to today’s Senate hearing – the immensely dull Senatorial opening remarks now followed by the rote remarks of the Goldman guys – I find it hard to summon up much outrage. As Michael Swenson has just said, “numerous clients” wanted the stuff – some wanted to bet “long,” others “short.” All these “clients” knew they were dealing with an investment bank with a lot of conflicting interests – proprietary trading, highly favored hedge fund clients, run-of-the-mill institutional clients, profit-seeking shareholders, and so on. My favorite of the line-up is, naturally, young Fabrice Tourre, of the confessional emails. He’s speaking now with French-accented fluent English, reading a prepared text which hit the Dow Jones Newswires earlier this morning. He’s “surprised” ACA believed hedge fund mogul John Paulson, on the other side of the transaction, was taking a long position. He denies the SEC’s charges. The Q&A will hopefully be interesting but so far – an hour into the hearing – there’ve been no revelations.