We should not be surprised that Goldman Sachs is using the sheer complexity of their deals and data to obscure any fraud and wrong-doing. It is quite arrogant that they would send them 2.6 billion pages of electronic documents as kind of way of flipping the bird and saying, “okay, you wanted the truth, here you go”. We can not expect them to come forward and tell us how they held back or provided any misinformation.
This looks to be a multi-trillion dollar fraud and there is a paper trail but it will be large and complex. The federal commission also stated in the LA Times article that complied a list of all instances where information requested from Goldman Sachs has not been provided or was simply ignored.
The panel, formally called the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, said it resorted to the subpoena after Goldman responded to an initial request by sending a massive amount of electronic documents — the equivalent of 2.5 billion pages — without saying where in those documents the answers to the commission’s specific questions might lie.
“We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices to dump a bunch of rubbish,” commission Chairman Phil Angelides told reporters during a telephone conference call.
A Goldman spokesman said, “We have been and continue to be committed to providing the FCIC with the information they have requested.”
The commission provided a list Monday of the numerous instances since January of this year when Goldman did not respond to requests from the commission, or responded late or with incomplete submissions. It also said it had been stymied in efforts to get interviews with key Goldman executives
Analysis: If we expect to get to the bottom of this huge financial crime, we are going to need to commit a vast amount of resources to have independent researchers actually sift through this mountain of evidence to find facts that support a fraud and possible cover-up. People need to be held to account and if we are serious then we need to step-up so the correct precedent is set, penalties assessed and criminals put behind bars or we might as well start counting the days til the next massive financial crime to be committed and believe me, it will be much larger next time and we might not walk away in tact from it.