There’s a lot to loathe about the current incarnation of the Senate, that elite club of millionaires where legislation goes to either get rewritten to serve corporate interests or killed. What does that say about DOJ, then, that the Senate is doing such a better job at investigating crimes? In just one month’s time the [...]

The NYT has what I assume to be a bizarre form of beat sweetener on Goldman Sachs today. It spends most of 1,300 words speculating on who might replace CEO Lloyd Blankfein if he were to step down, exploring three possible candidates in depth. But here’s the explanation for why they think such speculation appropriate: [...]

FROM: Mr. Lloyd Blankfein 200 West Street New York, New York 202-555-MOTU TO: CEO Chump City, ForeignLand Dear Sir: I have been requested by the Facebook Company to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter. The Facebook Company has recently concluded new agreements to share its users’ identities. The contracts have immediately produced moneys [...]

Perhaps the most stunning part of the Goldman Sachs hearing the other day came at the end of the hearing, after most of the press had left for dinner. Carl Levin challenged Lloyd Blankfein on something he had said to staffers. Blankfein claimed that he “never thought” of the fact that AAA ratings were important [...]

One of the highlights of today’s hearing on Goldman Sachs (aside from my Senator saying “shitty deal” over and over, was Claire McCaskill’s insistence on referring to Goldman Sachs’s Synthetic CDOs as gambling. (She did this earlier with another of the Goldman execs, after which John Ensign defended his state’s biggest industry, pointing out that [...]