<p>chump change for them.</p>
<p>The best government money can buy.</p>
<p>Didn’t they had to settle for like 1 billion dollars.:0 That’s a lot of money but I think what they did was wrong and should have paid more. I mean it was yuck to do 4 the public.</p>
<p>Well, they probably had to pay additional money in bribes, errr… make that lobbying expenses.</p>
<p>The cool thing is that their stock went up AH and their marketcap went up something like $800 million.</p>
<p>GS got screwed. They didn’t chose the mortgages for the investment and they sold the investment to some of the most sophisticated investors in the world. The buyers were obligated to conduct due diligence and obligated to make an informed decision. The fact that they lose money is not Goldman’s fault. The federal case was pure politics.</p>
<p>Well, navigating politics is part and parcel of what companies have to do. Look at the US tech companies in Europe. US companies putting manufacturing plants in European cities would probably keep them off the radar for “anti-competitive behavior”, also known as beating European companies.</p>
<p>I disagree with you razorsharp. And GS got a great deal. Business as usual for GS.</p>
<p>The $550 million. Chump change for GS. The bonus pool will be a few percentage points smaller.</p>
<p>Tigerdad is right.</p>
<p>I’m going to stray away from the political debate but will say that I’m happy with the settlement both as a stockholder and as a client. </p>
<p>$550 million is equal to just about two weeks of their net income. And an interesting note from BCEagle, their stock did go up with an increase valuation of about $7 billion if I remember correctly.</p>
<p>Goldman Sachs walked away w/ a huge profit and the $550 million will barely impact the company. I guess people are also forgetting the $550 million fine is the biggest the SEC has ever dished out. Yes, it’s smaller than the expected $1 billion fine, but it’s still the biggest fine to date.</p>
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<p>Correct, $550 million is equal to about two weeks of net profit; everyone’s bonus just shrunk by a few percentage points. Then again their bonuses went up double-digit percentage points b.c of what they did. </p>
<p>Did Goldman Sachs learn their lesson? Probably not.</p>
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<p>What what lesson was Goldman supposed to learn? Goldman didn’t cause the financial crisis, Congress and the Fed did. Goldman didn’t lie to anybody. Goldman didn’t prevent any of its sophisticated investors from doing their due diligence. </p>
<p>The only mistake Goldman made was for its employees to give millions of dollars to Democrats who took over the federal government and then screwed them. In a political sense they got what was coming to them.</p>
<p>On the evidence we have seen so far, there is no proof that GS did anything illegal. Good negotiations usually end with both sides unhappy and that looks to be the result here.</p>
<p>Better for all of us that this is behind us and we can move on with fixing other problems.</p>