 Lloyd Craig Blankfein is the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs |
|
aljazeera.net - 30 Sep 2011 - "A variety of strategies exist to profit from downturns; these are often lumped under the term 'shorting the market," Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, told Al Jazeera. "Instruments exist that allow investors to bet on a downturn and profit if and when the downturn occurs (in a specific stock or bond or derivative or in groups of them)." Goldman, for example, invested in subprime mortgages in the US, initially making money from selling a product which kick-started the 2008 recession, and then made more money betting against the market, as they allegedly knew the trouble they had caused. "Of course we didn't dodge the mortgage mess. We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts," Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein said in an e-mail dating from November 2007 and uncovered during a US Senate investigation in 2010. By shorting the market on subprime loans, Goldman reaped a profit of $4bn, while its rivals were hemorrhaging cash from the loan scheme.
|