The question should be did Goldman hide AIG and/or counterparty payouts in the orphan month of December?
Floyd Norris of NYT on the Goldman Sachs conference call this morning:
7:25 a.m. A.I.G.: Guy Moszkowski of Merrill Lynch wants to know if they made money from the now-famous government-financed American International Group transactions.
The answer is cautious. Most of the impact was in December. For the first quarter, the total A.I.G. effect on earnings was, in round numbers, zero.
So what was the A.I.G. effect in December? They did not say. Is it possible the loss then would have been larger without the A.I.G. bailout? We’ll see if any analyst asks.
7:15 a.m. December Write-Offs: They did discuss December up front (unlike in the news release). It sounds as if they took write-offs everywhere, including commercial real estate and private equity. They took more write-offs in both of those areas in the first quarter.
So how did they make money? One answer is that this is a great time to be in the banking business — if you ignore what we politely call legacy assets. Customers are desperate for cash, and will pay for it. Fees are up. If underwriting volumes continue to rise, this could be a great, great year. Assuming, of course, that the write-offs are over.
6:50 a.m. Where’s December?: Goldman Sachs reported a profit of $1.8 billion in the first quarter, and plans to sell $5 billion in stock and get out of the government’s clutches, if it can.
How did it do that? One way was to hide a lot of losses in not-so-plain sight.
Goldman’s 2008 fiscal year ended Nov. 30. This year the company is switching to a calendar year. The leaves December as an orphan month, one that will be largely ignored. In Goldman’s earnings statement, and in most of the news reports, the quarter ended March 31 is compared to the quarter last year that ended in February.
The orphan month featured — surprise — lots of write-offs. The pretax loss was $1.3 billion, and the after-tax loss was $780 million.
Would the firm have had a profit if it had stuck to its old calendar, and had to include December and exclude March?
We’ll see if they discuss that.
1 comment:
The plan worked well that was layed out in 2000. Goldman Sachs are the smartest guys in the room. They stole close to a Trillion dollars and brought down two of the oldest biggest companies and to smack the taxpayers in the face they borrowed bailout money and paying the taxpayers with taxpayers own money. Hank's shares have grown so big he's a billionair now. It was all in the plan. Notice how the White House chose the none experienced CEO Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs as US Treasury Secretary and that was no accident. Notice how all the people Hank hired to work were from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs robbed the taxpayers while laughing in our faces. Borrowing the Tarp money was just a smoke screen for what they really had stolen. Now Goldman Sachs will take Bear Sterns/Lehman Bros.'s clients and who knows they might become the biggest company in the World. Those wire taps worked really good as Americans thought they were for terrorist and Americans it was only used to spy on other companies to bring them down.
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