Jon Stewart calls them 'These Fucking Guys' - apt for Goldman Sachs' geniuses and their recent shenanigans. I read the following bit in the Times this morning that summed up the situation perfectly...

From here: Adam Smith taught us that the point of a robust capital market is to direct capital to its best and highest use, where, combined with labor, it will produce the goods and services most valued by society. Asset bubbles are a problem, but at least mortgage-backed securities enabled people to live in their overvalued houses. The Goldman “Abacus” transaction involved “synthetic” collateralized debt obligations, derivatives whose value rose and fell with the value of real C.D.O.’s elsewhere. It produced no goods or services, financed no consumption — nothing at all. Money that could, and should, have been used to add value to society was not invested; it was squandered as surely as if the parties had wagered on a horse race. Legitimate hedging is one thing. Gambling with people’s savings, university endowments and municipal funds, on the other hand, should be a crime. 


From here: Wall Street’s purpose, you will recall, is to raise money for industry: to finance steel mills and technology companies and, yes, even mortgages. But the collateralized debt obligations involved in the Goldman trades, like billions of dollars of similar trades sponsored by most every Wall Street firm, raised nothing for nobody. In essence, they were simply a side bet — like those in a casino — that allowed speculators to increase society’s mortgage wager without financing a single house. The mortgage investment that is the focus of the S.E.C.’s civil lawsuit against Goldman, Abacus 2007-AC1, didn’t contain any actual mortgage bonds. Rather, it was made up of credit default swaps that “referenced” such bonds. Thus the investors weren’t truly “investing” — they were gambling on the success or failure of the bonds that actually did own mortgages. Some parties bet that the mortgage bonds would pay off; others (notably the hedge fund manager John Paulson) bet that they would fail. But no actual bonds — and no actual mortgages — were created or owned by the parties involved.