Friday, October 18, 2013

Secretive Squid

Goldman Sachs released its 3rd quarter results yesterday. The press release is a classic of elevator accounting -- lots of numbers going up and down, but not a shred of analysis as to why. A New York Times article on the same issue concludes --

The lack of detail about the trading decline disappointed some analysts. “More disclosure would be better,” said Michael Mayo, a bank analyst at CLSA. “This is one reason that there is concern about large financial firms,” he said. “There is a lack of transparency in the areas that matter the most.”

The US government is providing large amounts of explicit and implicit insurance to a very large investment bank that can't or won't explain to people shifts of billions of dollars in its revenues.

The financial crisis changed nothing.