Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank have received subpoenas from a Senate committee that's probing whether they committed fraud in connection to last year's financial collapse, the Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.).
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Carl Levin, is said to be looking into whether those firms, and perhaps others, had private doubts about the mortgage-backed securities they were putting together, despite their rosy public pronouncements about the complex products.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (7)The man who will lead the special congressional effort to probe the causes of the financial crisis says his panel will also consider the government's response to the events of last fall -- including the controversial serial bailouts of AIG.
In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who was recently named by Congress to chair the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, noted that the statute that created his panel required it to look not just at the financial institutions that failed, but also at those that would have failed but for massive government intervention. That means that "it's going to be hard not to touch on those issues," said Angelides, referring to the various AIG bailouts -- which some have portrayed as disingenuous backdoor efforts to save AIG counterparties like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch from the consequences of their bad bets -- as well as other moves by the government to prevent a wider collapse of the financial sector.
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