Word: markets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lloyd Blankfein, the 54-year-old chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, is powerfully perplexed. In the past six months, his investment-banking and securities-trading firm has roared ahead in profitability by taking risks - that other firms would not - for itself and its clients in an edgy market. It has paid back the billions of dollars, and then some, of taxpayer money the government forced it to take last October; raised billions of dollars in capital from private investors, including $5 billion from Warren Buffett; and urged its cadre of well-paid and high-performing executives to show some...
...same as an actual conversation, Blankfein correctly points out. He recalls only a handful of actual conversations with Paulson or Timothy Geithner, then the president of the New York Fed. "Now, that was AIG week," he says, "but it was also breaking the buck on [money-market firm] First Reserve week, and it was the week when Lehman's bankruptcy caused huge problems in the prime brokerage system in London. There were a million things that I would have been talking to Geithner or [Paulson] about...
...make it a bad thing for people to migrate from business into other activities like writing or philanthropy or public service." Goldman, he notes, has already paid back the $10 billion - plus $318 million in dividends and an additional $1.1 billion to buy back warrants (at above-market value, he adds) - that Paulson forced it to take last October from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Taxpayers' annualized return on their nine-month investment in Goldman Sachs? A cool...
...portfolio. Goldman had already underwritten and sold billions of dollars' worth of mortgage-backed securities, much of it labeled investment grade by ratings agencies. It was, in fact, junk. But Goldman realized earlier than most that rot was setting in and famously decided to pull back from the mortgage market. The firm then shorted various mortgage-securities indexes - betting that prices would fall - at the very moment that other firms were still making big long bets on the securities. Goldman avoided losses while other firms infected themselves with the cancerous securities...
...pictures of the stock market crash...