Meet the Real Villain of the Financial Crisis

By BETHANY McLEAN
NYT

TODAY, we will have the pleasure of watching outraged members of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations fire questions at a half-dozen executives from Goldman Sachs. The firm first attracted anger for its return to making billions, and paying its employees millions, right after the financial crisis. And since the Securities and Exchange Commission this month charged Goldman with fraud over an investment tied to subprime mortgages, politicians have turned the firm into the arch-villain of the economic collapse.

But the transaction at the heart of the S.E.C.’s complaint is a microcosm of the entire credit crisis. That is, there are no good guys here. It’s dishonest and ultimately dangerous to pretend that Goldman is the only bad actor. And the worst actor of all is the one leading the charge against Goldman: our government.

Each of the supposed victims here was, at best, a willing accomplice. Let’s start with those who bet that the investment in question, Abacus 2007-AC1, would be profitable for them: a bond insurer called ACA Capital Holdings and a German bank named IKB Deutsche Industriebank. These companies allegedly didn’t know that Goldman, in exchange for $15 million in fees, had allowed a client, the hedge fund manager John Paulson, to help design the investment in order to improve the odds that it would fail.

But there was nothing hindering ACA’s ability to see that mortgages sold to people who probably couldn’t pay weren’t great investments. Meanwhile, the company’s insurance arm was covering as many subprime mortgages as it could to increase its own short-term profits. In some ways, the ACA story is the A.I.G. story: The company thought it had found free money — and basically bankrupted itself.

(More here.)

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