Great Day for Goldman

The saga of the Heinz call option insider trade, first profiled here, and the Goldman trail, also first observed here ("Does GS stand for Goldman Sachs one wonders"), just got even more fun as revelations that it was none other than a client of Goldman's Private Wealth group out of Zurich that hit the buy key on those thousands in call options one day ahead of the announcement.

John Lounsbury submits:On Friday the SEC made public civil charges of fraud against Goldman Sachs (GS) and 31 year old Vice President Fabrice Touree with regard to specific mortgage securities transactions.

(WASHINGTON) — Mary Schapiro will step down as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission next month after a tumultuous tenure in which she helped lead the U.S. government’s regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis. President Barack Obama designated Elisse Walter, an SEC commissioner, to replace Schapiro. Schapiro will leave Dec. 14, the SEC said Monday. She was appointed by Obama in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. She took over after the agency failed to detect the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Jake Zamansky submits:The SEC deserved a lot of credit for filing the case against Goldman Sachs (GS) for its dubious creation of the ABACUS CDO transaction. To recall, Goldman created the ABACUS deal so that a hedge fund manager could short the mortgage market, and then sold the securities to an unsuspecting client without disclosing the investment was built to fail.

John Lounsbury submits:According to Tracy Alloway at FT.com, an "unusually explicit" statement by Deutsche Bank (DB) has denied that it knows of any SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) actions for potential charges of the sort that led to a