Goldman Sachs E-mails Show Need for Volcker Rule, Brown Says
Business Week – April 25 (Bloomberg) — Internal Goldman Sachs Group Inc. e-mails released yesterday by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations show the need for financial reform that includes banning proprietary trading at U.S. banks, Senator Sherrod Brown said.
“These emails signify that there are all kinds of conflicts of interest on Wall Street, that Wall Street is working for its clients and working against its clients in the same sort of bundled toxic securities,” Brown, a Democrat from Ohio and member of the Senate Banking Committee, said today on ABC News’s “This Week.” “That’s why we need the Volcker rule. That’s why we need really strong reform that will separate the proprietary trading from banking functions.”
Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who leads the subcommittee, posted the e-mails on his website yesterday, which he said show the firm “made a lot of money by betting against the mortgage market.” Goldman Sachs responded with documents indicating the firm lost money on mortgages in 2008 and that executives didn’t know the market would fall.
