More Hypocrisy From Lloyd Blankfein On Charlie Rose

Courtesy of Tyler Durden

Just because Goldman refuses to get it, and wishes to inflict even more pain on itself with more and more public appearances, here is Lloyd on Charlie Rose last night. More of the same: “We did well because we had the disciplined hedging [on housing].” Paraphrase: “Thank you Paulson for letting us steal your idea and have our prop book go $10 billion short two months before HSBC and New Century went tits up. Also thank you for reminding us to short hundreds of millions worth of Bear stock.” Also, the amount of money put into Goldman by the government was not important for us. Ok Lloyd, please refund all the $2 billion in CDS profits you made by shorting AIG immediately.

And again Lloyd blatantly misrepresents the truth, by saying that doing away with prop trading would only cost the firm 10% of the firm’s revenue (so why the massive fight against the Volcker rule?). Forget all this market maker, liquidity provider generic fallback bs and mumbo jumbo. How about some disclosure on just how you classify prop trading Lloyd? Because something tells us that at least 50% of your flow and correlation desk is purely Prop (and certainly serves to bolster prop profits instead of putting clients “first” as we have disclosed about 10 times in the past week alone), as the 901 pages in Goldman discovery make only all too obvious (we will post on that soon). Hey Lloyd, here’s an idea – how about instituting P&L stop limits on all your OTC FICC prop trades just like RBS? Oh yes, we’ll go there… and in much more detail. Soon.

In the meantime, Goldman will “soul search” as an adjustment for people to “understand that Goldman’s fortunes must be aligned with the interests of its client.”  We are sure this will take the average Goldman prop trader exactly 2 milliseconds (or longer than it takes a Redi algo to frontrun a flashed block) to begin and end their soulsearching as they take their G-5s to Tahiti for the weekend.

And here is the kicker: “The reason why we get the best people, why we retain the best peopl, is because we get people who are really interested in doing something that they think is good for the public, for the world they are in.” At which point, Charlie shoots down the faux nobility with one simple phrase: “Make…

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