If wish I knew more about Goldman Sachs or at least worked for them

With all the talk about the economy, I don't know how true this article is, or how corrupt our banking system operates, but these issues really don't get any play from govt.

I think our banking system, and Wall Street deserves just as much blame and scrutiny regarding our economic problems as taxation, pork projects, and budget cuts.

"Today’s Goldman Sachs earning reports provides a valuable lesson on how things really work inside Wall Street’s largest investment houses. Goldman Sachs had an awful three months, losing $428 million in the third quarter of 2011, and yet it continued to shovel billions into the bonus pool it will share with its employees at year’s end.

Through the first nine months of 2011, Goldman set aside $10 billion in its compensation fund. If Goldman’s 30,000 employees split that bounty evenly, that would work out to $333,000 per person—plus the billions more Goldman will no doubt set aside in the last few months of the year.

Of course, the receptionist inside Goldman Sachs doesn't receive the same pay as all those analysts and other midlevel suits making salaries of $400,000 a year or more. Moreover, chieftains like Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who received $13 million in compensation last year, won’t have to share their year-end bonuses with as many people as last year. The bank laid off 1,300 employees in the third quarter of the year and plans on jettisoning another 1,000-plus jobs in the coming months.

Still, there are no doubt plenty of frowns inside Goldman today. For one thing, this was only the second time the investment bank has reported a quarterly loss since going public in 1999. For another, though this year promises to be a fat one, it won’t be as rich as 2010.

That $10 billion lags last year’s bonus pool—by 24 percent. But then the company’s profits per share through the first nine months of the year were down more than 70 percent compared with 2010—and Goldman's stock since the start of the year has fallen by 43 percent.

But that’s the beauty of working at a major investment bank. Performance doesn’t matter nearly as much as just showing up. Goldman booked $13 billion in pre-tax profits in 2010—a steep drop from the $20 billion the bank booked in 2009. Despite a precipitous drop in profits between 2009 and 2010 and a stock stuck in neutral throughout the year, the Goldman board of directors raised Blankfein’s base salary to $2 million, up from $600,000, and showered an extra $13 million in stock grants on Blankfein and his executive team.

Not bad for the executives of a bank forced to pay a $550 million fine after being accused by the SEC of duping its clients by selling them shares of a mortgage-backed security they allowed a hedge firm to secretly hand-pick. Still, this is hardly like the fat and happy subprime-mortgage days, when Goldman was buying toxic subprime mortgages and selling them to unsuspecting clients. In 2007, the year before the economic collapse, Blankfein made $68 million in stock and bonus money.

Is it any wonder the Occupy Wall Street crowd might think there’s something rotten about the system? "

http://news.yahoo.com/goldman-execs-stay-fat-happy-170700911.html

So tell me if this company evil or just nicely managed?

 

This is the part that sounded evil ' Still, this is hardly like the fat and happy subprime-mortgage days, when Goldman was buying toxic subprime mortgages and selling them to unsuspecting clients. In 2007, the year before the economic collapse, Blankfein made $68 million in stock and bonus money.'

I remember things like this-

"Goldman Sachs, among other Wall Street banks, and certain of favored hedge fund clients that were tipped off by the banks, reaped huge profits by shorting (betting against) “synthetic” collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) linked to residential mortgages, which the banks created and sold to other clients, according to Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story in their New Times article, “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won.”
To say the least, the conduct created a huge conflict of interest between Goldman and its “sucker” clients, and violated securities laws and regulatory rules, including the “fair dealing” requirement of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which is responsible for regulating the sales practices of such firms.
From 2005 through 2007, Goldman issued billion of these CDOs, according to Dealogic, a financial data firm. These CDOs include Abacus and Hudson Mezzanine, which were created and sold by Goldman. The CDOs consisted of credit default swaps, a type of insurance that pays out when a borrower defaults. The swaps made it much easier to place large bets on mortgage failures. Just 18 months after Goldman created Hudson Mezzanine, so many borrowers had defaulted that holders of the security paid approximately $310 million to Goldman and others who shorted it, according to the article.
“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”
As Morgenson and Story point out, the banks saw the mortgage meltdown coming and made the financial crisis worse than it might otherwise have been, effectively multiplying losses by providing more securities to bet against."

http://www.investmentfraudlawyerblog.com/2010/04/wall_street_firms_bet_against.html