I'll admit I have some recency bias here as I just re-read The Big Short about the '08 financial crash but I think you're probably right on the first point, they got a tip or heard around the proverbial finance industry watercooler that a crackdown was coming and decided to exit. I'm 100% certain they've got something else in the works, probably more opaque for regulators and the public with less risk to Goldman and a higher profit margin if history is to be believed.
It's not a big secret that the SEC doesn't like SPACs. They make these things really clear before they start taking action. They specifically have an issue with the fact that the prospectus for a de-SPAC merger isn't (yet) subject to all the same reporting rules as an S-1 filing.
When companies have to present their financials coldly instead of painting the nice warm dream, it's gonna deflate the market. Between that and the other factors hitting the market now (interest rates and inflation), there just isn't going to be a huge amount of work in the space in the future.
You really don't need to assume a conspiracy of some sort is involved when all the completely public factors justify this.
This not-big secret is also a not-new secret. These aspects of SPACs have been apparent since the invention of SPACs. What completely public factor accounts for the change in Goldman's policy ?
You really don't have to cape up for Goldman. They don't care what we think. They always have enough alumni in the government that they don't have to care. [0] The Biden administration is theoretically less infested with them than previous ones, but e.g. SEC Chair Gary Gensler and Examiner Adam Storch are both former Goldman people. There are probably more but I figured one minute on DDG was enough...
Why is it so important to you that a conspiracy must exist? What pushed you to ignore evidence so hard that you appear to think that a question I'd already answered is some giant gotcha? (What's different now? The market has cooled massively for other reasons.)
If you look at the new rules the SEC announced, they're so poorly written that no bank would see them as more than an accounting checkbox. Those rules are certainly not the reason for winding down a line of business.
If you want to attack connections between finance and the government, why not focus on real ones? Like, why are the new SEC policies so toothless? Who wrote them, and why?
It could easily be someone from GS, even! But people are a lot more likely to listen to you if you save your criticism for things that are based on facts and clear reasoning. A massive web of innuendo is worth a lot less than one direct problem.
As a firm they seem to be pretty interested in hearing stuff from the market. It was the only bank I worked with where they wanted some nugget off you each time we went out for dinner. The same people when moved to other banks would behave differently, so I guess it's part of the firm's culture: get some piece of info from each client.
Doesn't have to be nefarious though, if it doesn't make money for them they leave. Someone somewhere else in the business will find some other thing.
The SEC has been saying for months they were taking a harder look here. Just reading the writing on the wall. All the companies that have gone public via SPAC have not done well, not sure who would go public that way - I imagine no one will be holding the bag because most will give the money back and go away
Has anyone from Goldman ever actually been in trouble from the authorities?
That was my take from the 2008 financial crisis: the government had to fix everything. Again.
And no Hollywood movie about the European, American and Asian finance ministers who had to make sure the ATMs kept working.
Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre was basically Goldman's fall guy. Reasonably junior (in investment banking, VP is junior - analyst, associate, VP, director, MD) who had sent some stupid emails to his girlfriend ("The whole building is about to collapse anytime now. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!").
His crime was he wrote about it in company email... And the fact that he did so in bombastic terms (aka widows and orphans) was only fodder for the media.
Remember, your corporate email is not yours. Especially at a financial services firm.
One need only look at the nickel commodities market to understand that Goldman socks measures these things in terms of expected value, where if the benefit exceeds the EXPECTED VALUE (probability*fine) of the fines, they will have an active desk for it.
However the SEC recently increased its "Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit" staff from 30 to 50. Hopefully they'll bring the hammer down on token offerings with enough force to scare the big VCs away, at least.
I sure hope those scams took place on a public immutable distributed ledger and with multiple sophisticated parties performing signal intelligence on the chain. Otherwise, it might be a challenge to find the scammers.
Only retail investors ( aka suckers ) will be holding the bag/beer, as always.
I'm curious to know if Goldman Sachs already has an alternative scheme/scam running or it's a case of "chilling out for awhile".