Goldman Sachs: Ready the Pitchforks!

Point: Goldman Sachs just beat its earnings forecast, the recession is almost over! Three cheers for government intervention!

Goldman Sachs has beat Wall Street's earnings expectations, reporting profit of $1.66 billion during the first three months of this year. It's another sign that banks may be turning themselves around.

Counterpoint: WTF!

“The fact that they (like so many others) are being paid by the taxpayer through AIG’s “conduit” for losses that didn’t (yet) happen at 100 cents on the dollar might be the basic math.

And further (and potentially much worse) there is the repeated statement by Goldman executives that they were “fully hedged” against a potential counterparty default by AIG. One wonders - was that “hedge” to be short the equity on AIG itself, perhaps?

Why is this important?

Because if that’s how Goldman hedged they got paid twice and the taxpayer literally got robbed. Someone in Congress needs to look into this now; there are already rumblings of investigation. Those rumblings need to get a lot louder and turn into subpoenas, not “polite inquiries.”

If in fact Goldman (or anyone else) was “hedged” against a possible credit loss from their CDS with AIG and they were able to collect on that hedge (no matter what it was) those payments through AIG need to be clawed back immediately as nobody is entitled to be paid twice for the same risk and reap what amounts to a windfall profit by quite literally engineering a multi-billion dollar transfer of funds from the Taxpayer to the firm!”

Barry Ritholtz goes there:

"Makes you wonder if having a Treasury Secretary who was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs had anything to do with this.

Indeed, not only was Hank Paulson Goldie’s boy, but he was the same gentleman who so vociferously lobbied the SEC to allow the 5 largest iBanks to drop the net capital rule and leverage up 40 to 1."