While Wall Street and Main Street were in tears, officials at Goldman Sachs cheered at having made money shorting the subprime mortgage crisis, new Senate documents show.
“Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess,” Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote in a November 2007 e-mail to several of his top lieutenants after hearing that The New York Times was publishing a story about Goldman’s ability to dodge the mortgage crisis.
“We lost money, then made more than we lost because of the shorts,” Blankfein continued.
In another e-mail exchange a month earlier, Goldman exec Michael Swenson tells another exec, Donald Mullen, that several mortgage securities have been downgraded by credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service, and that as a result Goldman will owe some investors nothing.
