The SEC Sues Goldman

 

Yesterday the SEC sued Goldman Sachs for civil fraud. The case centers on Goldman’s 2007 ABACUS CDO, which it manufactured at the behest of hedge fund predator John Paulson. The scam was for Paulson to cobble together a toxic mess of MBS he expected would blow up, find suckers to buy this CDO, and then short it. Goldman’s role was to launder the CDO as having been conscientiously constructed. They used the good name of a vetting firm, ACA. Goldman supposedly told ACA that Paulson was consulting on the MBS selection and would be taking the same side of the bet as the buyers would be.

 

Goldman then cited ACA’s imprimatur in touting this CDO to the suckers – pension funds, other institutional investors, dumber banks, the usual suspects. Meanwhile it helped Paulson really bet against what was really garbage. It collected fat fees every step of the way, including from the investors it defrauded.

 

(Barry Ritholz compares it to The Producers, who try to defraud their investors by putting on a crappy play they expect to quickly close while embezzling much of the loot.)

 

Typical of this feckless government, it’s only a civil and not a criminal indictment. Even if the SEC is serious this time (which I won’t assume until I see it), Goldman would still get off easy for capital fraud.

 

Of course the terrorist stock market struck fast, with the Dow plunging 125.91 points, the most in tow months and ending a week-long surge, to punish this nuisance to the banksters. The MSM rushed to defend the market. The NYT showed great compassion for the victims and fear for the future. “A relatively calm day turned turbulent” as those regulatory barbarians struck out of a beautiful spring sunrise.

 

Expectations are unusually high this quarter: investors are looking for an average of 38 percent growth in profit. Banks have driven much of the strength in the market over the last year, helped by a period of historically low interest rates that have made borrowing cheap.

But analysts worry the golden days for the financial sector may be limited if government investigators intensify their examination of risky trading practices. That may raise new questions about whether the broader momentum in the market can endure.

“What you’re going to go into now is a market that is very skeptical about the outlook,” Mr. Battipaglia said. “Whether this recovery continues or flattens out will be made clear in the weeks ahead.”

 

Even in the first moments of the indictment the first speculation was on how GS probably had a heads up and took positions to capitalize. Zero Hedge was asking how, not if, they must have shorted themselves. Sure enough, a few hours later there were more specific rumors. It’s likely that Goldman has committed every financial crime it was able to conceive every time it could, so it would be extremely out of character for them not to have engaged against insider trading against their own market image. After all, it would only be shareholders who took any hit.

 

If the SEC is serious about this, that’s fine as far as it goes, though we have to assume the least. When everyone parses the technicalities of this or the similar Magnetar trade, or any of an endless list of crimes, we get bogged down in counting how many angels were dancing on the head of a pin. What was technically a violation? What was a “crime” in the legalistic sense.

 

This misses the big picture that the rule of law has already long since been subverted. The law was hijacked to legalize many of the worst crimes. A corrupt Congress led the way, with such abrogations of the rule of law as the CFMA, which unleashed CDS into a lawless free-fire zone. Where it’s technically impossible for “crimes” to be committed, crime can run wild. That’s just one example of how the rule of law has been completely liquidated. Few financial crimes are clearly identifiable as crimes anymore, since the system is set up to allow them to use the very complexity which enables their cons to also legally whitewash them. Meanwhile “regulators” are generally compliant and often accessories.

 

That’s the whole point of rule by administrative decree. You first liquidate the law and replace it by the rule of unaccountable bureaucrats. Then you select the bureaucrats themselves according to their conformity with whatever gangsterism is the regime you really want to impose. Any rogues who actually want to work in the public interest are bullied, marginalized, or purged.

 

So in any particular case like this struggling to figure out the technical extent of the “crimes” is likely to be a fruitless effort. Even if the process goes through the motions of establishing a technical violation, there won’t be any real punishment. It’s political theater. Meanwhile the overall criminal regime continues unabated. It’s misdirection.

 

The reality is always that the finance sector is organized crime, across the board. The government and the MSM want us to think that Goldman may have committed an isolated de jure violation here, an aberration from its general pattern of legality, with technical legality being synonymous with moral legality and with what any human community would treat as legal.

 

But the truth is the opposite. Goldman Sachs and all of Wall Street is a criminal enterprise. All of its major actions are crimes according to any common sense measure of morality and rationality. These crimes have simply been illegitimately legalized by a hijacked system of law. Goldman’s crimes are not the aberrations, but rather the criminal trend itself, while its truly legal actions are there only for money laundering and political cover, just like with similar criminal syndicates like the Mafia.

 

Since we live in a kleptocracy, this government will never actually restore the rule of law and bring justice to these rackets. Even what shreds of legality still remain will only be rarely, meagerly enforced. That this anodyne indictment (not even criminal) has been greeted with such a bustle is a testament to what a vacuum justice has become. We shouldn’t lose sight of the big picture – the entire finance sector is criminal, and this legal system has been hijacked and will never be sufficient to solve the problem. If we sit around and wait for the likes of the SEC to set things right, let them set the pace and dictate the scope of what can be done, we’ll definitely remain serfs and eventually become slaves.

 

In the meantime, what’s the real purpose of this lawsuit? The immediate consensus is probably correct. It’s meant to put on a big political show, to make the Obama administration look good as part of the rollout for his finance “reform” bill. In the end Goldman will at worst get a slap on the wrist. (But maybe not even that -there’s always Obama’s cowardice, his propensity to cave in under the slightest pressure even the rare times he ever tries to do something supposedly in the public interest. It wouldn’t surprise me if he fails to follow through on even this paltry little traffic ticket. Look at what happened to his bogus “Volcker rule”.) Meanwhile they seem to be setting up the standard “bad apple”, in this case one Fabrice Tourre, the Goldman cadre who ran the ABACUS operation. Presumably Blankfein and the rest of the brass have plausible deniability. Ah, there’s that “rule of law” again….

So the administration is inviting Goldman to make the bad apple defense. They can get together to make a deal. They can scapegoat this bad apple, implicitly exonerating the Goldman brass. Goldman gets a slap on the wrist, Obama claims a big phony victory. That looks like the plan. (But like I said, watch for Obama to instead cave in.)  

 

(Meanwhile we can see another example of the government’s bad faith in that phony finance bill. They’re sure in need of propaganda help for it. Its centerpiece is looking to be the “resolution authority” scam. We can see the scam when we look at how this vaunted, robust “authority” would actually require court approval to be exercised. The Federal Bankruptcy Court would have to sign off on any resolution. That’s absurd on its face.

 

Even assuming the government ever actually wanted to “resolve” a collapsing big bank instead of bailing it out, which we should never assume, how are you supposed to do this when you’re melting down so fast that “by Monday we won’t have an economy”? All a bankrupt bank has to do is stall, fight the action in court, and the government will feel it has no choice but to cave in and bail them out.

 

That’s the intended outcome of the “resolution authority” scam. It’s designed to fail even in the unlikely contingency that the government really tried to use it.)

 

These are history’s worst robbers. We need to stop obsessing on the scam “legalities” and develop a fully political consciousness and attack. Sure, when there’s a particular example like this, we can have fun with parsing it – but only and always within the broader context that this is part of a political war. Don’t let the government, the banksters, or myopic commentators frame it as: “Let’s see if they got caught in a technical violation. That’s the extent of culpability here. The burden of proof is on the accuser to prove his case according to the technicalities. If this fails, that signifies innocence.”

 

That would be the equivalent of a Russian in WWII having to prove in any particular case that German invaders were committing a technical crime.

 

The right way to look at this case, or any case like it, is “So for once you’re claiming you’re going to apply your law to one of these crimes? Refreshing. But we’re not going to let you fool us. We’ll believe you’re serious about justice when you restore real laws which criminalize all finance crimes. Until then this is all a scam. We’re not going to wait for a day that will never come. We’ll seek to redeem the law on our own.”