Search Results for: goldman sachs

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2024 ~ According to headlines at Bloomberg News and Reuters this morning, Donald Trump is floating the notorious hedge fund billionaire, John Paulson, to be his next Treasury Secretary. Paulson has, apparently, earned consideration for the post the same way Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s former Treasury Secretary, got the job: by raising a lot of money for the Trump political campaign. Paulson has hosted multiple fundraising events for Trump in the current election cycle and in Trump’s failed run for reelection in 2020. Paulson is the founder and President of the hedge fund Paulson & Co. On April 16, 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission had this to say about Paulson’s business morals when it announced formal charges against Goldman Sachs pertaining to the infamous 2007 ABACUS deal: “The SEC alleges that one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Paulson & Co., paid Goldman Sachs to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 29, 2023 ~ The employee at Apple who was put in charge of conducting due diligence on aligning the Apple credit card brand with Goldman Sachs, needs to be immediately demoted to sorting envelopes in the mail room. It has been a match made in hell, generating headlines in the business press over the billions of dollars Goldman Sachs has lost attempting to ramp up a credit card division from scratch while spawning federal investigations into Goldman’s less than timely handling of credit card customer complaints about fraudulent charges, billing errors, refunds, etc. After hundreds of those complaints piled up at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Bureau opened a federal investigation. (The CFPB is the federal agency created to hear directly from defrauded consumers following the 2008 Wall Street-generated financial crisis). In the most recent quarterly report filed by Goldman with the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 19, 2023 ~ For more than two decades, we have been reading about former employees of Goldman Sachs who have fled jobs there over a toxic, soul-crushing work culture. The pace of these stories has been picking up steam, rather than declining. Shareholders of Goldman Sachs should be asking themselves, is this good for the future of the company over the long haul and the price of its stock. Here’s a small sampling of some of the complaints from 2004 to the present: In 2004, Nomi Prins, now a well-known author and a former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, wrote the following in her book, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America: “When I left Wall Street, at the height of a wave of scandals uncovering scores of massively destructive deceptions, my choice was based on a very personal sense of right and wrong…So, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2023 ~ As we reported on February 7, there are some very strange things going on at Goldman Sachs. After reading the Wall Street investment bank’s annual report, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last Friday, the word “strange” doesn’t seem to do justice to the situation. Goldman Sachs is looking more like a litigation warehouse these days than an investment bank. According to Goldman’s annual report, it is being investigated for pretty much everything it does to make money: derivatives, currencies, mortgages, financial advisory, securities lending, dark pools, investment management, commodities, U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds, credit cards, hiring and compensation practices, research practices, compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, transactions involving government-related financings – and on and on. Things are so bad that it concedes in this annual report that it may have under-reserved for its legal costs … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2023 ~ Goldman Sachs’ online bank, Marcus, is offering an interest rate on its savings accounts that is 350 times the interest rate being offered by its competitors, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. That’s not normal. Not normal at all. (Above screen shots were taken this morning. Chase and Bank of America screen shots come from BankRate; Marcus screen shot comes from Marcus.) Marcus is the online banking platform offered by Goldman Sachs Bank USA – a federally-insured bank backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer. But what 99 percent of Americans don’t know about Goldman Sachs Bank USA is that it is the unit of Goldman Sachs that holds trillions of dollars in derivatives, including the kind of credit derivatives that blew up the U.S. economy in 2008 and would have taken down Goldman Sachs were it not for sneaky bailouts. According to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2022 ~ The newly installed U.K. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, (the third PM in seven weeks) has scrubbed his Goldman Sachs and hedge fund career from his LinkedIn profile and from his official government bio. But, unfortunately for Sunak, those careers have been assiduously chronicled in countless newspaper articles for more than a decade – and not in a good way. Sunak worked as a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2001 to 2004, where part of his research involved railways. He left Goldman to obtain his MBA at Stanford University, following which he joined TCI hedge fund in 2006 as a partner and worked there until 2009, when he left to co-found the hedge fund, Theleme Partners with Patrick Degorce. Sunak worked at Theleme Partners until 2014, when he moved into conservative politics in the U.K. That’s a total of 13 years … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 20, 2022 ~ There are eight Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBS) in the U.S. They are: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York Mellon, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Wells Fargo. These are the banks that pose the greatest risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and are monitored under the Federal Reserve’s stress tests. Five of those eight banks pose the greatest risk to financial stability because together they hold $200.18 trillion (yes trillion) in notional derivatives (face amount) or 86 percent of all derivatives held by all of the nation’s banks, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – the federal regulator of national banks. Those banks are: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. In any Senate Banking or House Financial Services Committee hearing that is going … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 29, 2022 ~ Tomorrow, Simon & Schuster will release a new book by Jamie Fiore Higgins, a woman who worked her entire Wall Street career at one firm. Over the span of just under 18 years, beginning on September 2, 1998 and ending officially on May 31, 2016 according to BrokerCheck, Fiore Higgins achieved a level of financial success rarely attained by a woman on Wall Street. She was fresh out of college, at age 22, when this journey began. She was a seven-figure Managing Director at the quintessential good ole boys club on Wall Street when it ended. Now, six years after she resigned her post (possibly heretofore restrained by the customary non-disparagement agreement one is asked to sign when leaving a Wall Street investment bank) Fiore Higgins is spilling the beans on what she saw and heard and experienced at Goldman Sachs. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2022 ~ On August 4, Goldman Sachs provided the following disclosure when it filed its quarterly report (10-Q) with the Securities and Exchange Commission: “The firm is cooperating with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in connection with an investigation of GS Bank USA’s credit card account management practices, including with respect to the application of refunds, crediting of nonconforming payments, billing error resolution, advertisements, and reporting to credit bureaus.” That bland statement doesn’t really do justice to the hundreds of complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by consumers using the Apple credit card that is provided by Goldman Sachs. The Apple credit card holders are alleging being put through a living hell by Goldman Sachs when fraudulent charges are made on their Apple credit card and a host of other problems. In typical Goldman Sachs style, it has managed to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 6, 2022 ~ We’ve been reading SEC filings for more than 35 years. We have to sadly say that the 10-Q that Goldman Sachs filed with the SEC on May 2, for the quarter ending March 31, 2022, shocks even our well-documented assessment of Wall Street as a crime syndicate. Goldman Sachs has listed pretty much everything the firm does as a target of an ongoing investigation, notwithstanding that the company and a subsidiary were criminally charged by the U.S. Department of Justice in the looting and bribery scandal known as 1MDB in October 2020, admitted to the charges, and had to pay over $2.9 billion. The good news is that Goldman Sachs’ Dark Pools are one of the areas it lists as being under a probe. Dark Pools (also benignly called Alternative Trading Systems or ATS) are effectively unregulated stock exchanges being run by … Continue reading →