Adding to Alex’s fine work here, Barbara Kiviat over at the Curious Capitalist blog, writes a post called, “Goldman Execs Still Don’t Get It.” It is long and worth reading. And excerpt:
After the mania ends, it is easy to look back and understand how behavior got out of hand. Three years after the credit crunch began, it is shockingly simple to review the tape and say, “Oh, yeah, we shouldn’t have been doing that.”
Unless you work at Goldman Sachs. Time and again at today’s hearing, Goldman executives refused to admit, even in retrospect, that they had crossed a line. Time and again at today’s hearing, they defended their actions by saying that they were rightly responding to market demand—as if responding to market demand somehow absolves one of the responsibility to use human judgment. I kept waiting for one of them to stand up and scream, “Look, we did things we shouldn’t have, we did things that defied common sense, but that’s the nature of an asset bubble! We’re sorry, we are, we’ve learned from our mistakes and we have better risk controls. But you have to know, we’re not bad people. Everyone got out of hand. We’ll own up to own fair share, but please understand that more people than us had a hand in this.”