Goldman’s Sach’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mr. Lloyd C. Blankfein’s total compensation, including a cash bonus, had been raised to $19 million in 2010, according to a regulatory filing on Friday April 8th 2011.
This is the same guy who testified before Congress that Goldman’s sales people had no obligation to tell their clients that the financial products they were advising them to buy were the same products that Goldman was betting against . . .. and made millions when these products failed.
The fundamental, centurie’s old ethic of simply telling the truth to your own clients is now passe, according to Blankfein’s testimony, because modern investing has new rules based based upon on the new realities and financial products of the marketplace (got that). Accordingly, if you have information that a complex financial product, which has a triple A rating, (which you paid the rating agency for) is certain to fail because you know what exactly is in it, and you still encourage your own customer to buy it, it is the customer’s own fault when it fails. He or she simply made a bad decision.
If the customer depended on the triple A rating, he should have known that these ratings (under the new rules) are not based upon any investigation as into their actual value, but simply the “opinion” of the rating agency who also has no responsibility for any “due diligence”. In fact the more triple A ratings he gives these products the more sold, and the more (millions) the rating agency receives.
This is the new and very “sophisticated” financial market that accounts for the largest single share of our gross national product (pun intended). We have not only lost our ability to produce any actual, useful, physical products but the derivatives we are swimming in is a cesspool of fraud and deceitfulness and fantasy. If this is to be the basis for the new economy we are doomed.
