Yay! Today is sub-prime mortgage day on kottke.org, I guess. The collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market took everyone on Wall Street by surprise...except Goldman Sachs, which earned $11.6 billion in 2007 when everyone else lost money. How'd they do it? Michael Lewis says that Goldman went against the flow in shorting sub-prime mortgages by assuming that the entire rest of the industry, including their own expert and extremely well-paid traders, were, as Lewis puts it, "a bunch of idiots".

Update: Here's the WSJ article mentioned by Lewis in the above piece. (thx, andy)

• finance
• goldmansachs
• Michael Lewis
• money
• real estate

New York magazine has a great collection of stories about how various NYC businesses go about making their money. They cover everyone from a taxi driver to a sex shop to Goldman Sachs to the MoMA.

• business
• goldmansachs
• MoMA
• New York magazine
• NYC
• working

A record-breaking year for Goldman Sachs; they're setting aside $16.5 billion for salaries, benefits, and bonuses. That's $622,000 (!!!!!!) for each employee. Instead of the typical business puff piece telling us about what these i-bankers are going to do with their money (cars, houses, expensive dinners!), how about investigating where all this money is coming from and what, exactly, Goldman does that's so beneficial to the economy to earn such incredible profits.

• business
• finance
• goldmansachs
• money