Ah, the latest Goldman PR headache.
As its name suggests, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is the 10-member commission trying to figure out the root causes of our recent financial crisis.
In the course of its investigations, it calls in folks like Warren Buffett and experts from the big banks, including Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS). While the commission has issued 12 subpoenas (including one for Buffett), only its recent subpoena of Goldman Sachs has been accompanied by accusations of obstruction.
The runaround
The commission has been trying to get relevant data from Goldman Sachs since January. When you read the commission's timeline of events, it reads like a landlord hounding a deadbeat tenant. It's filled with "oh, I'll have it tomorrows," pleas for extensions, and partial satisfaction.
But what precipitated the subpoena was Goldman's data dump of five terabytes of data (equivalent to billions of pages) onto the commission. To give you an idea of how much five terabytes is ... the entire text of the Library of Congress is 20 terabytes.
Like finding a Waldo in a garbage haystack
The head of the commission likened the data to a pile of trash and noted that he's not about to go looking for Waldo or searching for a needle in a haystack.
Of course, it makes sense why Goldman is stalling. The information the commission is looking for (on its credit default swaps, its collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and its interactions with AIG (NYSE: AIG)) could be really ugly from a legal and PR standpoint.
But Goldman and the rest of its Wall Street ilk at least owe us a peek into their inner workings so we can try to learn from our mistakes.
Or, rather, their mistakes.
Riled up? Here's something you can do about Wall Street's shenanigans.
