Goldman Settles; Fabulous Fab is Left on His Own

Goldman Sachs settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s not a surprise. Goldman did not want to litigate this action. It wanted it to go away.

As a shareholder in Goldman, I wanted it to go away. It seems others did also. GS stock price opened at $138.50 on Thursday morning. It opened at $151.47 this morning. That’s a 10% increase based on the settlement. The stock has been down 21% since the SEC filed its complaint.

Goldman is going pay $550 million, with $250 million going to investors and $300 million going to the SEC. The dollar amount is not a surprise. I assumed the top dollar amount was the $1 billion lost by investors. I think the time it took between the filing of the action and the settlement was largely focused on how much Goldman was going to pay to make this ugly incident go away.

That is a big dollar amount. As SEC enforcement director Robert Khuzami points out, it’s the biggest SEC fine against a Wall Street firm. There have been bigger fines in other industries.

According to Footnoted, Goldman has $27 billion is cash and short term securities. It’s big dollar number, but Goldman can find that much the cash by looking under the cushions on its couch.

Unfortunately for Goldman VP Fabrice Tourre, he is not included in the settlement. The SEC is continuing its litigation against him. Fabulous Fab has a Monday deadline to respond to the SEC complaint. Fab still works at Goldman but is on paid leave.

He is trying to clear his name. Goldman just paid to get theirs back.

Sources: