Thoughts on Wall Street and Life, Goldman Sachs Edition (GS)

I was just reminded of a comment I left at MarketBeat way back in August 2007, just as "sub-prime" was percolating into the public's consciousness. First, a teaser of MB's post:

The five stages of grief, as far as we know, do not include blame, but there’s a lot of finger-pointing going around. Sentinel Management reportedly said in its letter to clients that “we had previously thought that the market would return to some semblance of order and that our clients would not join the panic.” Ah, but they did. And Goldman Sachs, in a statement regarding the assets it is holding in its Equity Opportunity Fund, said, “We believe the current values that the market is assigning to the assets underlying various funds represent a discount that is not supported by the fundamentals.” Once again, it’s somebody else’s fault for not recognizing Goldman’s modeling genius....

And the comment:

• • 6:00 pm August 14, 2007
  • Climateer wrote:

  Mr. Gaffen,
  You hit just the right note with the tone of this post.
  I was looking at some of the comments from the last couple months, taking MarketBeat to task for the serial subprime posts.
  It’s not like this came out of the blue.
  Sometimes these guys need to be held up to gentle (or not) ridicule.
  One of my all-time favorite Barron’s headlines was:
  

  “Better Get the Leg Irons Boys; These ain’t Regular Criminals, These is Stockbrokers”

  Keep it up.

Still one of my favorite Barron's headlines.