No more “sh***y deals” at Goldman

Dick Taffe — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:38:27 +0000

On the heels of Congressional hearings in which e-mails from Goldman Sachs traders told of “sh***y deals” being offered to customers, the Wall Street bank has now banned profanity in company e-mail correspondence. School of Management master lecturer Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner and author of “Uncontrolled Risk” about the fall of Lehman Brothers, says profanity was never the problem at Goldman — it was excessive risk taking with other people’s money.

“Wall Street has been built on the backs of aggressive traders that talk tough and take sizable bets. Addressing swearing but ignoring excessive risk taking is simply a legal maneuver devised to protect Goldman Sachs, and leaves our economy exposed to its risky practices.”

Contact Mark Williams, 617-358-2789, williams@bu.edu

Nations consider bank taxes

Dick Taffe — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:22:19 +0000

Germany is moving to adopt a new bank tax to cover the cost of possible future bailouts, and France is considering the same thing. Former Deputy Comptroller of the Currency Robert Bench, now a senior fellow at the BU Law School’s Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law, says perhaps the best way to protect the taxpayer against troubled financial companies is to keep the institutions out of trouble in the first place.

“Rather than tapping financial firms to create a government fund which always will be inadequate, perhaps require financial companies to put away significantly more of their earnings into ‘prudential reserves,’ making the institutions ‘too safe to fail.’”

Contact Robert Bench, 617-353-5428, bobbench@bu.edu

BU Now » financial bailout

No more “sh***y deals” at Goldman

Nations consider bank taxes