http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article7107198.eceFABRICE TOURRE, the 31-year-old trader at the centre of the Goldman Sachs fraud allegations, dismissed the complex debt products he created for the bank as “pure intellectual masturbation”.
In a series of damaging emails released yesterday, Tourre also compared the products to a “Frankenstein” monster that had “turned against his own inventor”.
Other emails that emerged yesterday showed Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive, boasting about the money the bank made from the housing market collapse. “Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess,” Blankfein wrote in November 2007. “We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts (bets against housing).”
The Blankfein emails were released by a Senate committee that will take evidence from him and Tourre this week. The committee is investigation the firm’s role in selling sub-prime mortgage products. The probe has been triggered by a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that alleges Goldeman defrauded investors of $1 billion (£650m).
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More @ link, if you can stand it.
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