Goldman Sachs Senate hearing: live blog

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/richard-adams-blog/2010/apr/27/goldman-sachs-senate-hearing-live-blog

Read from bottom to the top

Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and trader Fabrice Tourre are giving evidence to a Senate hearing on the bank's trading during the credit crisis. Follow the action live with Richard Adams


11.55am: Chairman Carl Levin rather ominously says: "We'll be here as long as it takes," in case the Goldman Sachs witnesses want to run out the clock. The Goldmans people should take that seriously, as a promise not a threat. This is the US Senate. They love talking on TV.

There is some serious A.D.D. going on here, and if you think about it, it's quite scary. Could it be the prime cause of the banking industries meltdown? Or should it be looked at as a symptom which enabled the banks to justify their disregard for a lack of ethics?

11.45am: Yikes. Susan Collins accuses the Goldmans witnesses of trying to "burn through" the committee's time, after Tourre asked her to repeat a long question

Senate finds fraud in Washington Mutual mortgage lending

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2010-04-12-wamu-mortgage-fraud_N.htm

Now if you or I had committed the act of fraud, there would be no possibility of a decision for referral it just automatically happen.


Senate investigators say they found that the mortgage lending operations of Washington Mutual, the biggest U.S. bank ever to fail, were threaded through with fraud.
And the bank's own probes failed to stem the deceptive practices, the investigators say in a report on the 2008 failure of WaMu.

Chairman Carl Levin says the panel won't decide until after the hearings whether to make a formal referral to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.