McClatchy Does Its HomeWork on Goldman Sachs
They have some good investigative work here, here, and here. If Fox went over Goldman with the same energy it pursued Acorn, no one in Congress would go within a mile of its lobbyists.
But Fox won’t go after Goldman, because Fox is ideologically committed to free markets, which means trying to curtail Goldman’s recklessness goes against its very DNA. Indeed, Fox News Conservatism insists that only when Goldman is free to do whatever it wants can true prosperity be gained.
From one of the McClatchy stories:
In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.
Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.
Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.
But securities laws are exactly the type of “government regulation” conservatives detest.
Capitalism: Smell it.
