Working Life

    Even investors are now starting to distance themselves from Goldman Sachs: After reports on Thursday evening that federal prosecutors had opened an investigation into trading at Goldman, raising the possibility of criminal charges against the Wall Street giant, the firm’s stock was downgraded on Friday by two analysts. Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating […]

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   And the next shoe to drop: Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading, people familiar with the probe say. The investigation from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is at a preliminary stage, stemmed from a […]

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   The Senate hearings made clear: Goldman Sachs—and other Wall Street firms—profited by gambling with the American peoples’ livelihoods. It was a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” scam. As Sen. Carl Levin memorably stated: “You knew it was a shitty deal, and that’s what your emails showed.”     But, what Levin and other […]

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   Over the weekend we learned this: In late 2007 as the mortgage crisis gained momentum and many banks were suffering losses, Goldman Sachs executives traded e-mail messages saying that they were making "some serious money" betting against the housing markets.   The e-mails, released Saturday morning by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, appear […]

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   This got lost in the shuffle last week but is worth highlighting: The legal drama surrounding the controversial takeover of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, one of the pivotal moments of the financial crisis, took a fresh turn on Thursday as the attorney general of New York leveled civil fraud charges against Kenneth […]

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Solidarity is one of the bedrock principles of the labor movement. It has a pretty sound strategic and tactical basis: you can’t win if your ranks are divided. I don’t mean that you can’t have debate. I mean that we have to support certain general principles. Here is an example: public employees are not to […]

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They robbed Americans of their future. They cost perhaps a generation of hard-working people a decent pay check. And they left millions of people with empty 401(k)s, with some seniors being booted from their retirement homes because there was no money left. And, yet, they still don’t get it–or maybe they truly don’t care.   […]

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   I will have a lot more to say next week about the whole executive compensation issue and how it fits into the larger picture of our economy. But, for today, I think we should not get too excited about this news: Bowing to calls for restraint in tough economic times, Goldman said that its […]

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   This caught my eye this morning: Some of the largest shareholders in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have urged the Wall Street firm to reduce the size of its bonus pool, arguing that it should pass along more of its blockbuster earnings to investors, according to people familiar with the situation. The investors hold tens […]

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   I do not think it was a coincidence that Goldman Sachs announced its drop-in-the-bucket $500 million fund to help small businesses yesterday. Because the most important news is a report issued by the government bailout inspector that says Goldman got a huge gift from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, led at the […]

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