Perhaps the most stunning part of the Goldman Sachs hearing the other day came at the end of the hearing, after most of the press had left for dinner. Carl Levin challenged Lloyd Blankfein on something he had said to staffers. Blankfein claimed that he “never thought” of the fact that AAA ratings were important to sales and that some buyers only buy AAA rated products.
Somehow I have a feeling this claim is going to come back to haunt Blankfein.
One of the highlights of today’s hearing on Goldman Sachs (aside from my Senator saying “shitty deal” over and over, was Claire McCaskill’s insistence on referring to Goldman Sachs’s Synthetic CDOs as gambling. (She did this earlier with another of the Goldman execs, after which John Ensign defended his state’s biggest industry, pointing out that everyone knows the odds are gamed to make sure casinos win, whereas with finance, the House keeps changing the odds after bets have been placed.)
But don’t worry. Lloyd Blankfein tells us none of this is immoral.