Arizona: Merrill Lynch

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

McClatchy News continues its investigative report on Goldman Sachs with part 3 of the series Goldman left foreign investors holding the subprime bag:

Inside the thick Goldman Sachs investment circular were the details of a secret, $2 billion deal channeled through a Caribbean tax haven.

The Sept. 26, 2006, document offered sophisticated U.S. and European investors an opportunity to buy into a pool of supposedly high-grade bonds backed by residential, commercial and student loans. The transaction was registered through a shell company in the Cayman Islands.

Few of the potential investors knew it, but the ratings of many of the mortgage securities hid their true risks and, in some cases, Goldman's descriptions exaggerated their quality.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have written in this space before that I consider the giant Wall Street investment banks that nearly destroyed our economy to be nothing more than Ponzi schemes, a Casino Royale for unregulated speculative investments of no hard asset value, fueled by the greed of unscrupulous investors. To paraphrase Don Henley from a New York Minute, if I were in charge, "somebody's going to emergency, somebody's going to jail."

Much has been made of the Bernard Madoff and Robert Stanford investigations into their Ponzi schemes. But these guys were small fish compared to what the giant Wall Street investment banks did, and are still doing today using taxpayer TARP money.