goldman sachs

"Separating core banking franchise from speculative activities, imposing tighter leverage requirements and examining the complicated relationships between high frequency traders and banks constitute critical steps toward ensuring our financial markets are strong and stable.

By adopting these common-sense proposals, we can go a long way toward stabilizing our economy, restoring confidence in our markets and protecting the American people from a future bailout.

America cannot afford another financial meltdown and the American people are looking to Congress to ensure that that does not happen." - Ted Kaufman

Goldman reported a blow out EPS number today on a minor miss to revenue: this was mostly due to a substantial cut to employee compensation accrual, which went down from an annualized accrual of $20 billion previously to $16.193 billion for FYE 2009. In fact in Q4, Goldman reported a negative expense to compensation and benefits of ($519) million compared to $5.351 billion in Q3. Did Rahm have some tete-a-tetes with Lloyd recently? With 32,500 FTE, per employee compensation was $498,153. We will provide bonus numbers for some key individuals in the days ahead.

It appears that prop trading could soon be on its way out. Luckily, it only accounted for "just over" 10% of Goldman's revenue: it will therefore likely not be missed. Bloomberg writes: "President Barack Obama tomorrow will offer new proposals on limiting the size and complexity of proprietary trading systems as a way to reduce risk-taking, a senior administration official said." While this is not yet the formal end of prop trading which may or may not be a legal way to take advantage of the commingling between flow and prop trading, thus scalping clients in a perfectly acceptable manner (define the word "acceptable"), it has all the makings of the beginning of the end. And, much more importantly, this marks the long-awaited beginning of Glass-Steagall's return.

Rep. Darrell Issa comes out guns blazing once again, alleging that the Fed provided a selective response to the subpoena to provide all documents relating to the AIG bailout, and asks Edolphus Towns, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to hold Fed officials responsible for this act, in contempt. While we are confident that the Fed will promptly respond to this request for incremental disclosure, we would like to propose some additional very material and non-public information that Congressman Issa should request from the Fed...

In one week, Tim Geithner will testify before Congress on his involvement in the AIG disclosuregate scandal, which, in late 2008 sought to prevent material information about AIG counterparty make-whole arrangements from seeing the light of day. Of course, in March of 2009, following political pressure, AIG and the FBRNY caved and disclosed that $27 billion in taxpayer capital had been used to yield to the bankers' every whim and to take them out at par, while their underlying AIG CDOs were priced 50% lower, if not more. Zero Hedge previously wondered when will Goldman be approached by the SEC with questions on whether or not they sold their direct AIG protection in the form of CDS to parties under a "big boy" letter, or did Goldman transact on a $2.5 billion notional position while in possession of material, non-public information. This, of course, in addition to having absolutely no impairments on their actual CDOs, thereby providing the firm with material excess returns over and above what their total capital at risk would have been. With Goldman's Stephen Friedman accompanying Geithner in the hearings, he hope that someone in authority will finally ask the right questions. And while they are at it, and have both a Goldman and a New York Fed employee in tow, maybe they can ask why NY Fed Senior Vice President on AIG Relationship Monitoring Steven Manzari told former AIG Financial Services CFO Elias Habayeb to "stand down on all discussions with counterparties on tearing up/unwinding CDS trades on the CDO portfolio."

Two of UK's largest hedge funds, Bluecrest and Brevan Howard, are making or considering moves out of London to Geneva. London's mayor, Boris Johnson, is worried that thousands of the City's bankers will flee to escape higher taxes and more regulations. Will the rush to Geneva spell trouble for global regulators?

What will happen when the 26-mile long tanker convoy carrying 127 million barrels starts offloading since the oil storage trade is no longer as profitable?

Crude oil futures fell for five straight sessions as warmer weather in the U.S. dispelled forecasts of unusually low temperatures and allowed concerns about demand to come to the fore. The price for Nymex’s West Texas crude fell about 6% during the week, starting at nearly $83 and finishing at $78.

And you thought JP Morgan was aggressive. Goldman just threw out the last trump card in its current sell-side arsenal by increasing Q4 GDP estimates from 4% to a paroxysmal attack inducing 5.8%. While Zero Hedge long ago gave up discussing corporate fundamentals due to our long-held tenet that currently the only relevant pieces of financial information are contained in the Fed's H.4.1, H.3 statements, and, when Ron Paul's attempt at Fed deobfuscation is finally successful, the Fed's daily Sources and Uses of Funds statement, it would appear even macro economic data now is essentially one big joke. We are confident that JPM and Goldman are right on the money, and that the government will present the economy as having grown by nearly 6% in Q4. What is troubling is that after having taken over the housing and treasury market, and according to some others, the equity market as well, the Treserve (thank you Marla) has also singlehandedly added several log scale orders of magnitude of volatility to the general economy itself. Too bad GETCO does not have some predatory algo floating around, and overextending GDP momentum in any one general direction, as at this rate we would not be in the least surprised if Obama's Disinformation Czar (TBD) were to announce that the US is now competing for 10% GDP growth with China. As the two countries' centrally-planned economic systems now differ, well, not at all, it is only a matter of time before the race to the bottom in currency devaluation is enjoined by a competition as to who can fabricate, manipulate, inflate, stimulate and other "-ates", the fastest.

Let’s assume for a moment that Goldman Sachs is wrong. After all, at most points in time and space, predictions tend to fail—except the lucky ones. So it’s good to think through scenarios that one would consider extremely remote. Active risk management means low probability / high catastrophic outcome tail events must be hedged, and as importantly, gain exposure to those pesky Blacks Swans in ways that lead to advantage. To accomplish this, it helps to obtain a quantitative sense of their impact, to get a “feel for the cloth” as an wise former boss of mine used to say. So let’s try here.

What if the Fed more than succeeds in reflating and the end result is hyperinflation? As remote a possibility as I think this is, they really could print a way to another, completely different type of economic destruction. All they have to do is print proactively, not reactively.

The company which came to investors two years ago via Goldman Sachs peddling the biggest turd of a business model caked with 10 layers of lipstick for a global refi, and proceeded to file for bankruptcy before even one coupon payment was made (we hope that's a warning to Hexion 1.5 lien investors... wtf is a 1.5 lien anyway?), is throwing in the towel once again, and preparing to file for Chapter 11 for the second time in as many years according to the WSJ. Sucks for investors Sopris Capital and Aspen. We hope they managed to extract some equity out of this brilliant investment while they had the chance.

• JP Morgan Chase & Co: 51.50, last 46.3 +5.25
• Goldman Sachs Group Inc: 104.50, last 100.5 +4.00
• Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc: 114.50, last 105.5 +9.00
• Morgan Stanley: 119.50, last 113.5 +6.00

Are bond markets signaling the start of the Great Transition? Will inflationists or deflationists get the last laugh?

It will be interesting to see how optimistic/pessimistic this quarter's bank credit losses will be reported. Here are some very interesting facts on the latest trend in Alt-a mortgages that have been in the news as of late. The following charts were culled from my mortgage default model which was built primarily from date gathered from the FDIC and the NY Fed.

If the government isn't doing anything to fix this dangerous situation, we'll have to do it ourselves ...