True or False? http://www.felixsalmon.com/000684.html Wednesday, February 28, 2007 Will Goldman Sachs help absorb subprime losses? According to a rumor over at Dealbreaker, one of the big losers in the subprime mess is none other than Goldman Sachs: âNot sure if this is on your radar, but a Goldman trader took a $1B (yes, that is $1 Billion) position in a sub-prime mortgage index last week. He was fired today after the position suffered a roughly 35% decline. I canât verify if it was closed out yet, but the loss thus far stands at about $350M. Talk about a bad week.â This is bad for GS, of course. But it's also really good news for anybody worried about the systemic risks associated with all these newfangled synthetic debt products. In the old days, banks wrote mortgages and took the associated risks. Then they started securitizing those mortgages, spreading the risk more thinly across bond investors. And then investment banks started creating products based on mortgage indices, which meant that the bond investors could offload a lot of their risk even further onto CDOs and hedge funds and prop desks at Goldman Sachs. Basically, the more money that Goldman loses, the less money that people who can't afford it are losing. So, thank you, unnamed Goldman trader!
i was being funny - but off the top of my head i think they made about 3 billion last quarter so a 350 million dollar day won't affect anybody's christmas ham. cept the dude who pulled the trigger who probably got packaged out for a few million if its even true...
what a fu@*ing idiot!!! what kind of traders do they hire? bottom of the barrel college flunkies? Duh, huh huh, me tinks reel state is reely guud place to stik sum mony.
in the bottom of my heart I hope GS has a huge yacht party this summer for all their VP's and they hit a barge
I actually heard this rumor from a credit trader the middle of last week, but I heard the loss at 60%. No idea if that's true or not.
Ivy league, top GPA, little or no personality, etc. Booksmarts are a must, common sense & a keen sharp sense is rarely considered. Standard top of the class Ivy league preppie, from your standard Ivy league family with connections. I've had the experience doing some business with GS "traders", quite a shock, to say the least. Not the credit division, another one. These firms are not what they used to be. Nowdays they are big corporations riddled with bureaucracy, nepotism & incompetence. Don't mistake GS's special edge for raw talent, hunger & true intelligence. Don't get mistaken by their numbers either, you guys would not believe the nonsense that goes on inside the major bulge bracket firms. That's why so many boutique firms have been able to succeed & flourish in the last 5-10 years, even snatch deals right from under the big guys.