The bank’s chief executive Lloyd Blankfein wrote in November 2007 that the firm “didn’t dodge the mortgage mess,” but “made more than we lost” by betting against the housing market, the Associated Press reported.
The e-mail was one of several company documents subpoenaed by a Senate investigations panel. In many of the e-mails, Goldman executives brag about money they were making as the market crashed around them.
One Goldman Sachs trader wrote in e-mails to a woman he apparently was courting that investments he had sold were “like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor.” In another e-mail, the same trader dismissed the debts created for the bank as “pure intellectual masturbation.”
“I’m trading a product which a month ago was worth $100 and today is only worth $93,” wrote Fabrice Tourre, who was charged along with the bank in a civil complaint filed this month by the Securities and Exchange Commission. “That doesn’t seem like a lot but when you take into account … (the investments) are worth billions, well it adds up to a lot of money.”
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