The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many international financial centers. Goldman Sachs is the second largest investment bank in the world by revenue and is ranked 55th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. In the Forbes Global 2000 of 2024, Goldman Sachs ranked 23rd. It is considered a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.
A collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is a type of structured asset-backed security (ABS). Originally developed as instruments for the corporate debt markets, after 2002 CDOs became vehicles for refinancing mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Like other private label securities backed by assets, a CDO can be thought of as a promise to pay investors in a prescribed sequence, based on the cash flow the CDO collects from the pool of bonds or other assets it owns. Distinctively, CDO credit risk is typically assessed based on a probability of default (PD) derived from ratings on those bonds or assets.
IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG is a bank headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was established in 1924 under the name Bank für Industrie-Obligationen. IKB supports medium-sized enterprises in Germany and Europe with loans, risk management, capital market services and advisory services. The online offering for retail banking customers covers overnight and term money, bank savings schemes, bank deposits and selected commercial papers. The bank has six branches in Germany. Single shareholder is the investment company Lone Star.
The American subprime mortgage crisis was a multinational financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010 that contributed to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. The crisis led to a severe economic recession, with millions losing their jobs and many businesses going bankrupt. The U.S. government intervened with a series of measures to stabilize the financial system, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
An asset-backed securities index is a curated list of asset-backed security exposures that is used for performance bench-marking or trading.
Residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) are a type of mortgage-backed security backed by residential real estate mortgages.
The subprime mortgage crisis impact timeline lists dates relevant to the creation of a United States housing bubble and the 2005 housing bubble burst and the subprime mortgage crisis which developed during 2007 and 2008. It includes United States enactment of government laws and regulations, as well as public and private actions which affected the housing industry and related banking and investment activity. It also notes details of important incidents in the United States, such as bankruptcies and takeovers, and information and statistics about relevant trends. For more information on reverberations of this crisis throughout the global financial system see 2007–2008 financial crisis.
John Alfred Paulson is an American billionaire hedge fund manager. He leads Paulson & Co., a New York–based investment management firm he founded in 1994. He has been called "one of the most prominent names in high finance", and "a man who made one of the biggest fortunes in Wall Street history."
A synthetic CDO is a variation of a CDO that generally uses credit default swaps and other derivatives to obtain its investment goals. As such, it is a complex derivative financial security sometimes described as a bet on the performance of other mortgage products, rather than a real mortgage security. The value and payment stream of a synthetic CDO is derived not from cash assets, like mortgages or credit card payments – as in the case of a regular or "cash" CDO—but from premiums paying for credit default swap "insurance" on the possibility of default of some defined set of "reference" securities—based on cash assets. The insurance-buying "counterparties" may own the "reference" securities and be managing the risk of their default, or may be speculators who've calculated that the securities will default.
Credit rating agencies and the subprime crisis is the impact of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the American subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 that led to the financial crisis of 2007–2008.
Michael James Burry is an American investor and hedge fund manager. He founded the hedge fund Scion Capital, which he ran from 2000 until 2008 before closing it to focus on his personal investments. He is best known for being among the first investors to predict and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis about the build-up of the United States housing bubble during the 2000s. It was released on March 15, 2010, by W. W. Norton & Company. It spent 28 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, and was the basis for the 2015 film of the same name.
Magnetar Capital LLC is a hedge fund based in Evanston, Illinois. The firm was founded in 2005 and invests in fixed-income, energy, quantitative, and event-driven strategies. The firm was actively involved in the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) market during the 2006–2007 period. In some articles critical of Magnetar Capital, the firm's arbitrage strategy for CDOs is described as the "Magnetar trade".
Paulson & Co., Inc. is a family office based in New York City. Previously, it was a hedge fund established by John Paulson in 1994. Specializing in "global mergers, event arbitrage, and credit strategies", the firm had a relatively low profile on Wall Street until its hugely successful bet against the subprime mortgage market in 2007. At one time the company had offices in London and Dublin.
Inside Job is a 2010 American documentary film, directed by Charles Ferguson, about the late-2000s financial crisis. Ferguson, who began researching in 2008, said the film is about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption", amongst them conflicts of interest of academic research, which led to improved disclosure standards by the American Economic Association. In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis.
Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse is a report on the financial crisis of 2007–2008 issued on April 13, 2011 by the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The 639-page report was issued under the chairmanship of Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn, and is colloquially known as the Levin-Coburn Report. After conducting "over 150 interviews and depositions, consulting with dozens of government, academic, and private sector experts" found that "the crisis was not a natural disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products, undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street." In an interview, Senator Levin noted that "The overwhelming evidence is that those institutions deceived their clients and deceived the public, and they were aided and abetted by deferential regulators and credit ratings agencies who had conflicts of interest." By the end of their two-year investigation, the staff amassed 56 million pages of memos, documents, prospectuses and e-mails. The report, which contains 2,800 footnotes and references thousands of internal documents focused on four major areas of concern regarding the failure of the financial system: high risk mortgage lending, failure of regulators to stop such practices, inflated credit ratings, and abuses of the system by investment banks. The Report also issued several recommendations for future action regarding each of these categories.
Gregory S. Zuckerman is a special writer at The Wall Street Journal and a non-fiction author.
Jeffrey Glynn Tarrant was an American investor. He was the founder and chairman of MOV37 and Protégé Partners, firms specializing in identifying, seeding and early stage investing in investment funds. He was also a founding partner of film production company Candescent Films. He died from brain cancer in 2019.
Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, has been the subject of controversies. The company has been criticized for lack of ethical standards, working with dictatorial regimes, close relationships with the U.S. federal government via a "revolving door" of former employees, and driving up prices of commodities through futures speculation. It has also been criticized by its employees for 100-hour work weeks, high levels of employee dissatisfaction among first-year analysts, abusive treatment by superiors, a lack of mental health resources, and extremely high levels of stress in the workplace leading to physical discomfort.
