The Faustian Bargains of Goldman Sachs

Today's news online reminds us of all the pacts that Goldman Sachs has made in order to attain and maintain power and money. The stink from Goldman Sachs is so profound that one hardly knows where to start:

There is the new Goldman Sachs "interested" guy who morphs from Peter Simonji to Peter Haller in order to carry out his side of the bargain. He has moved from the SEC to Goldman Sachs and from Goldman Sachs back to government (Congress) where he lobbies for Issa right and left against regulations of derivatives, regulations that might affect Goldman Sachs's bottom line. Pheww!

Then there is Fred N. Sauer's excellent summary of all the nefarious maneuvers Goldman Sachs has undertaken to retain money and power, including the important use of borrowed Fed money that Goldman Sachs needed to remain afloat during the financial crisis of 2008.

However, the story we will go with today concerns Matt Taibbi's latest expose of the SEC. Our Goldman Sachs guy there is Adam Storch about whom we have heard before here. You can see from the excerpt below that the threat of criminal prosecution does make a difference in people's behavior. We need more of the same and perhaps a good place to start is at the SEC.

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?
A whistleblower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals.
By Matt Taibbi - Rolling Stone

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For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

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Wester copied the letter to Adam Storch, a former Goldman Sachs executive who less than a year earlier had been appointed as managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division. Storch's appointment was not without controversy. "I'm not sure what's scarier," Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic observed, "that this guy worked at an investment bank that many believe has questionable ethics and too cozy a Washington connection, or that he's just 29." In any case, Storch reacted to the NARA letter the way the SEC often does – by circling the wagons and straining to find a way to blow off the problem without admitting anything.

Last August, as the clock wound down on NARA's 30-day deadline, Storch and two top SEC lawyers held a meeting with Flynn to discuss how to respond. Flynn's notes from the meeting, which he passed along to Congress, show the SEC staff wondering aloud if admitting the truth to NARA might be a bad idea, given the fact that there might be criminal liability.

"We could say that we do not believe there has been disposal inconsistent with the schedule," Flynn quotes Ken Hall, an assistant chief counsel for the SEC, as saying.

"There are implications to admit what was destroyed," Storch chimed in. It would be "not wise for me to take on the exposure voluntarily. If this leads to something, what rings in my ear is that Barry [Walters, the SEC documents officer] said: This is serious, could lead to criminal liability."

When the subject of how many files were destroyed came up, Storch answered: "18,000 MUIs destroyed, including Madoff."

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Please read all the details in the article here