PRESS RELEASE
More Hearings,
Call for Criminal Investigation
On How Goldman Sucks
April 21, 2010 (EIRNS)—Reports have it late on Wednesday that Sen. Carl Levin's Permanent Investigations Subcommittee will have both Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and its London derivatives trader and "VP," Fabrice Tourre, as witnesses in an April 27 hearing. The Subcommittee has just finished with a thorough expose of the vast "securitization" of the 90%-fraudulent mortgage loans by Washington Mutual Bank; Levin is clearly attempting to craft the "new Pecora hearings" which Obama and the Democratic leadership nixed last year. "How Goldman Sucks" could be, to these hearings, what the grilling of J.P. Morgan, Jr. was to Ferdinand Pecora's explosive 1933 hearings into Wall Street's "banksters."
Goldman's public "defense" against the charges that it committed securities fraud in 2007, and swindled investors to the profit of itself and its inner circle, appeared to change this morning. From dismissing the SEC's charges, Goldman's law firm Sullivan and Cromwell appeared to shift, to blaming any wrongdoing on the then-28-year old Tourre. This tactic has been been much used recently by banksters when caught, from Barings in 1995, to Societe Generale in 2008. But Levin's hearing could force Blankfein and Tourre to confront each other on the spot, making that tactic much more difficult.
Any number of other big financial institutions, in building up the super-leveraged global debt bubble which burst in 2007-08, pulled the same fraud against investors, smaller banks, etc. of which Goldman is accused. Deutschebank's lead mortgage securities trader was infamous for profiting from derivatives bets against the securities he sold. The giant UBS in Switzerland was sued in 2009 by German state bank HSH Nordbank for the same practice; Citibank, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, and others all enjoyed fleecing sucker investors with so-called "synthetic mortgage derivatives" from 2007 on. They clearly knew their bubble was blowing up, and used "Venetian methods" to throw the disatrous costs onto private investors, and then onto government bail-outs.
But the Goldman Sucks case is sufficient to keep throwing out Lyndon LaRouche's challenge: "Should we be paying to bail out fraud?"
Today Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and 17 other House members, in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, asked for a criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs to begin.
