Reference no: EM132687300
In the mid-2000s, hedge fund manager John Paulson approached Goldman Sachs after speculating bubble in housing, fueled by cheap money from banks. During the early 2000s, mortgage originators had started bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Many of these bonds were given favorable ratings from Moody's and Standard & Poor's, suggesting that they were safe investments. Paulson believed that these ratings were wrong and that many CDOs were far more risky than investors thought. He believed that when people started to default on their mortgage payments, the price of these CDOs would collapse.
Goldman Sachs decided to offer bonds for sale to institutional investors as synthetic CDOs. Goldman Sachs asked Paulson to identify the CDOs that he thought were very risky and grouped them together into synthetic CDOs. Paulson then took a short position in these synthetic CDOs. Paulson was effectively betting against the synthetic CDOs, a fact that Goldman knew, while he was actively marketing these bonds to institutions. Shortly thereafter, people started to default on their housing payments, the price of houses did fall, and the value of CDOs and the synthetic CDOs that Goldman had created plunged.
Paulson made an estimated $3.7 billion in 2007 alone from the event. Goldman Sachs, too, made over $1 billion by betting against the very same bonds that it had been selling. In April 2010, the SEC formally charged Goldman Sachs with civil fraud, arguing that the company had knowingly mislead investors about the risk and value of the synthetic CDOs, and failed to inform them of John Paulson's involvement in selecting the underlying CDOs. Goldman argued that a market maker like Goldman Sachs owes no fiduciary duty to clients and offers no warranties-it is up to clients to make their own assessment of the value of a security. However, faced with a barrage of negative publicity, Goldman opted to settle the case out of court and pay a $550 million fine. In doing so, Goldman admitted no legal wrongdoing, but did say that the company had made a "mistake" in not disclosing Paulson's role, and vowed to raise its standards for the future.
Answer the following questions:
-Did Goldman Sachs break the law by not telling investors that Paulson had created the synthetic CDOs and was betting against them? Was it unethical for Goldman Sachs to market the CDOs?
-Would your answer to the question above change if Goldman had not made billions from selling the CDOs? Would your answer to the question above change if Paulson had been wrong, and the CDOs had increased in value?
-If opinions vary about the quality or riskiness of an investment, does a firm like Goldman Sachs owe a fiduciary duty to its clients to try to represent all of those opinions?
-Is it unethical for a company like Goldman to permit its managers to trade on the company's account (i.e., invest on the company's behalf rather than an external client's behalf)? If not, how should compensation policies be designed to prevent conflicts of interest from arising between trades on behalf of the firm and trades on behalf of clients?