Today's (Saturday, April 17) Business section of The New York Times has several articles regarding the SEC/Goldman Sachs case, as well as other information regarding how this one case and thousands of others like it contributed to the financial crisis. I can't recall a single 8-10 page section of a newspaper that had so many pertinent and interesting articles.

You will be enraged by how much money the "free market" was able to earn, while at the same time contributing to or even causing the financial crisis that is affecting all of us and even the entire world. One of the counterparties to the deal that the SEC is suing Goldman about, the Paulson hedge fund, earned something in the range of $40 billion in just 2-3 years. They are not a party to the SEC complaint, as they did not break any laws or violate any financial industry regulations. They didn't because there weren't any, all regulations applying to derivative financial products or the firms that traded them having been excluded from regulation by an act of Congress right at the end of the Clinton administration. (Do you think there might have been any special interest money behind that bill?)

What these New York Times articles do describe is the desperate need for strong new regulations that will permit the government to oversee and control the amount of systemic risk being created by these firms in the interest of profit, even while knowingly risking the financial collapse of the financial system.

The print edition of the Saturday NYT has all these great articles. I'm not sure that they're all in the online edition. I think the NYT remains a free site, so you should be able to read all the articles I referred to posted electronically.

Here are a few of the articles I found particularly enlightening. I hope they're free so you can navigate to them and read them...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/bu...cus.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/bu...era.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/bu...p=5&sq=&st=nyt

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/bu...p=2&sq=&st=nyt

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/us...p=3&sq=&st=nyt