Sometimes you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't. At what point did the average person feel so bad for big sophisticated investors that they directed their anger soooo much toward the broker.
The public anger toward Goldman is nothing more than the average person thinking Goldman did something wrong to them. But that is not the case, not the case at all.
Whatever evils Goldman may have done, one thing is for certain, they did NOTHING to the average investor.
Big banks were dealing with big banks (or hedge funds), and Goldman was in-between. Yet the little guy thinks it is somehow related to them. Its not, no matter how many dots you connect or degree of separation you are looking at. The fact of the mater is Goldman did not dupe stupid unsophisticated investors. They delt with people who are certified to be in this business.
The second people start realizing this fact, they can focus on more important things like properly regulating Fannie and Freddie Mac. Or putting to jail the CEOs that were reckless with their companies, and the financial system.
Watching the public deterioration of a bank that actually did the right thing, with risk management, is disturbing. Its a disturbing moral hazard. Basically the SEC, and public, is saying it was better to fail and cost tax payers money, then institute the correct practice.
Ethically GS may have been wrong, but we can not police ethics, only actions. Nothing is perfect, and ethics can always be improved, but at what point do we say enough-is-enough. At what point are individual certified investors responsible for their own actions.
After all, if the demand for these security products were not present at the time, a credit bubble would not have been formed. Just like when there was no demand for corporate credit in 2008, the economy pretty much stopped for a few months.
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