Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Tuesday its second-quarter profit easily surpassed expectations as profit was buoyed by strength in its trading and underwriting businesses.
You, of course, saw the bizarre news last week that a former Goldman employee had left the bank and taken the bank’s proprietary trading code. Taibbi has more:
if you’ve followed Zero Hedge’s speculations dating back months about Goldman somehow manipulating program trading at the NYSE, this is connected to that, as the theory here is that Aleynikov stole the computer program that Goldman may have been using to manipulate the NYSE.
Such speculations until recently may have sounded like conspiracy theories, but then last week Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti stood up in court and let loose a whopper. “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways,” he said.
Again, this is a federal prosecutor quoting Goldman Sachs, admitting in open court that it has been using a computer program that can be used to unfairly manipulate markets. Take that information and couple it with the insane data about Goldman’s share of program trading volume since the beginning of the year and… well, you can draw your own conclusions.
Update: Glenn Greenwald with much more.
Update II: Hmmmmm…..
