This is a terrifically clear explanation by Steven Randy Waldman about why Goldman Sachs’s failure to disclose material information violated the law, supporting the SEC’s case and challenging GS defenders. The noise around the internet makes the issue seem more complicated than it is, Steven simplifies it. – Ilene
A knife fight is not a mediation
Courtesy of Steve Randy Waldman at Interfluidity
The excellent Ezra Klein has ruined his electoral career for nothing. That’s a shame; I’d vote for him. Ezra writes:
If an investment bank is structuring a trade for two clients, it has an obligation to serve its clients. That is to say, it needs to structure the trade they want to be part of and disclose all relevant information necessary for them to evaluate the trade. But if the firm, or the employees structuring this trade, think that one side is going to win and the other is going to lose, I don’t think they have an obligation to warn the losers… The SEC’s case against Goldman simply says that they failed to disclose relevant information that one side needed to decide for themselves whether going long on the Abacus deal was a good or bad trade. That is to say, the issue isn’t whether Goldman acted in the client’s best interest but whether they made it unnecessarily difficult for the client to act in his own best interest.
Goldman wasn’t structuring a trade between two clients, as far as IKB and ACA were concerned. It was working to form a business entity called ABACUS 2007-AC1, LTD and underwriting an issue of securities by that entity. The only clients formally involved were IKB and ACA, and they were on the same side of the deal.
If this had been an adversarial deal, Goldman would have had no obligation to inform the side that wasn’t paying it whether they were making a good trade. But if this had been an adversarial deal, Goldman would have been advising one party or the other. Both parties could not have been its customers.
Imagine you are trying to buy a house. It is contentious. Disputes arise over price, warranties, settlement terms, etc. You would hire an agent, and the other party would hire an agent. Those agents would be different people. The hazards of relying on the same advisor in a difficult negotiation are obvious.
IKB/ACA may have been “sophisticated”. They may have been dumb, or corrupt, or unlucky. But, in an adversarial negotiation with John Paulson, they would not have shared the same agent with him. A knife fight is not a mediation.
The whole issue is that IKB/ACA did not know that they were in an adversarial negotiation and that the other guy had Goldman Sachs as its agent. They thought Goldman Sachs was working for them, underwriting securities of a special purpose entity it was putting together to satisfy investor interest. If IKB/ACA had been negotiating a very complex $192M custom trade with John Paulson, there would not have been a “flipbook” and a “prospectus”, just sign the dotted line. There would have been conference rooms and long hours and thousand-page paranoid contracts scrutinized and initialed in triplicate.
There is no circumstance where an investment bank “structures a trade for two clients” whose interests are opposed when the terms are anything but standard. I mean, really. Think about it. It’s Orwellian — Goldman calls a practice that is absurd on face “market making”, and suddenly it’s normal except for technical questions about who picked what securities or who should have suspected something.
What happened here is nothing like what a market maker does. A market maker takes the other side of client-initiated trades, and then lays off the risk. ABACUS was initiated and sold by Goldman Sachs, at a hidden party’s request. Goldman was unwilling to make a market for Paulson at a price he would have accepted, so it manufactured an entity willing to do so. Investors in that entity were not informed that they were dealing with an active, involved adversary. And Goldman has the nerve to call both sides of the arrangement “customers”.
This was a high finance version of the same pump-and-dump schemes you get by e-mail. Paulson needed buyers for what he was selling. Goldman sent around the flipbook until it found some, and without revealing that a hidden counterparty wanted to dump. This is not an ethical practice. I don’t know whether it’s illegal. But if really smart, well-intentioned people like Ezra can’t quite see that it’s disreputable, if it seems like a he-said, she-said technical kind of thing, we are in deep trouble.
P.S. For this deal to be okay, Paulson’s role would have had to be disclosed plainly and in writing. His name need not have been mentioned, although it would not have remained hidden for long. But Goldman would have had to reveal that a party wishing to take a large short position had initiated the deal and would be involved in its design. Goldman would also have had to make clear, in writing, that this party was its client.
Like many Goldman apologists, I suspect that by the time the deal closed, some of the ACA guys probably knew or had guessed what was going on. Maybe the IKB guys knew too. That doesn’t matter. Individuals taking bonuses for deals at ACA and IKB were not the “investors”. ACA and IKB’s shareholders were the investors, and ultimately British and German taxpayers. Goldman had an obligation to put important facts in writing. By not doing so, Goldman created plausible deniability for employees at ACA and IKB who had a personal interest in closing the deal. The wink-wink/nudge-nudge act mitigated career risk, helping to enable corrupt stupidity. Informal disclosure does an end run around risk managers at both firms, who would have expected discussion of an active, adversarial counterparty in the documents they reviewed. Even if some people at ACA knew, the deal might never have gotten done had ACA or IKB formally known. $192M deals that become $1B deals should be fully documented, in ink.
