美国证监会起诉高盛欺诈投资者

This is very big because the sound you hear is the other shoe dropping on Wall Street. People have been saying for years that Wall Street was playing these games where Wall Street profited from ripping people off essentially. And here you have evidence of that. That's the SEC's allegation in any case.

What they're saying is that the two most successful firms in the subprime housing crisis, the two firms that made out best in the subprime housing crisis, Goldman Sachs and the hedge fund Paulson & Company, these guys were colluding essentially to rip people off. That is a huge allegation. And it shows that the SEC is back and it has teased a lot of people who said the SEC was nowhere. And I think everyone assumes this is the tip of the iceberg. We're gonna see more of these.

Yeah, because if you think about it, it was... I don't know who this Paulson & Company is. Maybe we can find out more about that. But we certainly know about Goldman. But there were a lot of banks...

John Paulson, (No, go ahead.) John Paulson is the guy who made four billion, he made four billion shorting the housing market. And if these allegations are true, that looks a little bit less prescient, and a little bit more, I'm not sure what, a little bit more sneaky. I don't know. Is that the word I mean? This thing has very big ramifications for the way this is all going to be seen in the history books, and of course it also has ramifications for civil suits and all sorts of other things.

How about the pervasiveness of this practice? That we know there were all kinds of banks involved in bundling up these subprime mortgages and selling them wherever they could find a buyer. So it seems to me, particularly in light of the fact that we've got Congressional hearings going on on the financial collapse right now, that groups like WaMu, the former Countrywide, that there are implications for all of those former and current financial institutions.

Well, right. I think that something like this is always one of the lessons, the announcements like this are always good for the lawyers. I think we're gonna have lawyers who are gonna have a full employment act out of this. You know, I think that we've seen other, we've seen allegations that this was going on elsewhere. Propublica did a story the other day about a hedge fund called Magnetar that was involved in this sort of thing. And there were Wall Street banks that were involved in that as well. And so I think that the, you know, the kind of the legal angle of this is the Wall Street potentially is going to have to pay out a lot of money. And it's gonna be very busy fighting these kind of allegations over the next couple of years.

Hey, Colin, is there a trickle down on the... No, go ahead, make your point.

You know, the other thing is that this is just... I would assume we're going to eventually see, maybe not in this case, but somewhere along the line, we're going to see the Justice Department get involved in this sort of thing too. And once again, we haven't seen a lot of that. We haven't seen a lot of, you know. People have been saying where are the perp walks. There is obviously a huge amount of fraud going on in the subprime area up and down the line. When are we going to see someone go to jail for that? This is not that. This is a civil case. There are no criminal allegations. The SEC is not commenting on any Justice Department referral here or anything like that. But it... you know, everyone is now looking for that too. We're expecting to see something like that at some point because it is obvious that there's a lot of very brazen stuff going on.

Okay, so that, we are talking about at least at this point is the charge of defrauding investors. But, look, we are talking about individual home buyers who will be making potentially a stronger case now that they were defrauded, correct?

Yeah, I mean absolutely. That's... You referenced WaMu. I mean there is the hearing on the WaMu earlier this weekend in the Senate. (Absolutely.) I mean, the materials the Senate investigation committee pulled out on that are amazing. They... WaMu knew that there were mortgage offices that they had where 83 percent of the loan were fraudulent. You know, five or six loans being made were fraudulent. And they did almost nothing about it. So I mean, obviously, the price of this is going to be paid for a long time. It's already been paid by individual home owners and by investors. And I think that, you know, the people who were involved in this thing and made out on it are going to pay the price eventually.

Glossary:

perp walk: A slang term describing the police action of parading an arrested suspect in handcuffs before the media.

short: 卖空