15 Apr 2009

Goldman Sachs Discovers the Joys of Off-Budget Accounting

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I am not versed enough in corporate accounting to talk responsibly about this. All I can say is, when Goldman Sachs conveniently decides to shift its fiscal year to exclude a December that had more than $1 billion in (pre-tax) losses…something is really fishy.

Now if we had private financial markets, I wouldn’t care about this. “So what? Like investors are that dumb.” But we don’t have private financial markets, and I think Robert Wenzel called it long ago. Do we need more flesh-eating bacteria to avert a Treasury default?

(HT2 Paul Krugman, who apparently thinks the Bush Administration invented funny government accounting tricks.)

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