Goldman Sachs agreed to a $550 million dollar fine from the SEC yesterday in a civil suit over a package of mortgage-backed securities designed by a hedge fund which was shorting the housing market. It’s both the largest SEC fine against a financial company in history and nothing more than a bug to Goldman Sachs. [...]

Two weeks ago, if you told me I’d be writing the above headline, I’d think I must have been hired by The Yes Men to do one of those “imagine the possible” fake New York Times articles. But no, this is actually happening: The Securities and Exchange Commission has referred its investigation of Goldman Sachs [...]

If we had a media that highlighted events in proportion to their importance to the nation, Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations would be plastered across every channel in the nation, including MTV. He has done some spectacular work on the financial crisis in a series of hearings, essentially morphing into the Pecora Commission, the [...]

Carl Levin’s committee, which claims to have more smoking gun evidence of malfeasance at Goldman Sachs, will welcome their top execs before a Senate panel next week: On Tuesday, the Goldman Sachs trader accused of fraud by federal regulators, Fabrice P. Tourre, and at least three of the bank’s top executives will testify before a [...]

Carl Levin (D-MI), whose Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last week revealed major mortgage fraud at Washington Mutual, apparently has more up his sleeve for Goldman Sachs. In addition to hearings next week on the financial giant: Levin’s staff has uncovered new documents “that link certain actions to specific people” at Goldman, according to a senior [...]

Democrats certainly seem to think that they can use the fraud at Goldman Sachs to push through regulations to the financial system. That’s what Barney Frank said today, adding “It reinforces the need for much of what we were doing.” Is that really true? I think it’s a lot easier to focus attention on health [...]

The last 72 hours have left Goldman Sachs with a shattered reputation among the people who matter to them, their customers and the politicians they have courted. The SEC’s civil fraud suit over one of their synthetic CDO deals is bad enough, but it’s just getting worse and worse for them. First of all, the [...]