Goldman ripped off their own clients in an effort to make profits for other Goldman client.

Those statements bring to mind a well-known quote from Warren Buffett, who invested $5 billion in Goldman back in September 2008 near the peak of the financial crisis: "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it."

SHOOT: Survival of the financial fittest, greed is good, or theft, dishonesty and hypocrisy?

clipped from www.moneyweb.co.za Throughout the aftermath of the financial crisis, Goldman and its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, have consistently stuck to the same story when asked why the bank had created and sold to its clients subprime mortgage-backed securities that quickly became worthless: The firm was merely giving those clients what they wanted. That's what market makers do, Blankfein told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission last January. "What we did in that business was underwrite to, again, the most sophisticated investors who sought that exposure," he testified. That may have been true when it came to the Goldman client Paulson & Co, which made $1 billion shorting these allegedly custom-made CDOs by buying credit-default swaps on them. If we are to believe the SEC's claims, though, it wasn't true for the Goldman clients that lost $1 billion on the CDOs, including the chumps at IKB, which lost $150 million. Can't wait to see how Goldman tries to talk its way out of this one.