This is an unusually pleasant way to start my morning:
Goldman Sachs, which emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis, was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.
….The instrument in the S.E.C. case, called Abacus 2007-AC1, was one of 25 deals that Goldman created so the bank and select clients could bet against the housing market. Those deals, which were the subject of an article in The New York Times in December, initially protected Goldman from losses when the mortgage market disintegrated and later yielded profits for the bank.
As the Abacus deals plunged in value, Goldman and certain hedge funds made money on their negative bets, while the Goldman clients who bought the $10.9 billion in investments lost billions of dollars.
Goldman claimed that the securities bundled into Abacus had been chosen by independent managers, but in fact they’d been carefully cherry picked by hedge fund manager John Paulson, who selected the crappiest mortgage bonds possible because he wanted to bet against them. Goldman apparently thought that was a fine idea, because they wanted something to bet against too. So a synthetic CDO purposely designed to do poorly seemed like a great idea.
But Goldman wasn’t the only one. Hopefully this is just the first SEC suit of many.
