How Carl Levin got Goldman Sachs's goat

But I pointed out point blank to Blankfein: "Your motto is that you need the trust of your clients, that your client comes first." Well that's not true. That is simply not true.

SHOOT: Exactly. Blankfein says they rely on their client's trust and that's exactly what they abuse.

clipped from money.cnn.com When they did answer, some people have asked me, "Were they telling you the truth?" The answer is yeah, and that's what's even more troubling than the evasions -- they are defending what most people would say are indefensible actions. They shouldn't be betting against what they're selling at the same time they're telling you: "Here, these are our securities, our names are on the prospectus." I think people think that someone selling something believes their product needs to succeed in some general way; that they want it to succeed. But [Goldman Sachs] are betting against [their product] and basically say they are going to profit from its failure. At that point, in most people's minds, clearly in mine, there's a conflict of interest. You're betting against a product that you're holding out to the public, by fair assumption, as a good product. They think they can do anything they want, that it's a dog-eat-dog market and all these sophisticated buyers know that.