Consider that only a small percentage of Americans are aware that they can file a complaint with the CFPB to seek resolution, and fewer still know where to go on the internet to do that. If hundreds of Americans have filed a complaint, it is highly likely that there are actually thousands of complaints that have not been filed. The CFPB knows that from experience.
It’s possible that the folks at Apple are unfamiliar with the century of abuses to customers by Goldman Sachs. Key milestones include the Goldman Sachs Trading Company’s conduct in the asset bubble of 1928. The Trading Company was a closed end fund (called a trust in those days) that Goldman Sachs created and offered to the public at $104 a share, stuffed with conflicted investments while paying Goldman a hefty management fee, only to end up a few years after the 1929 stock market crash trading at a little more than a dollar.
Then there were the 2010 Senate hearings where Goldman Sachs was shown to have been allowing hedge fund titan, John Paulson, to pick subprime debt likely to fail for one of Goldman’s securitized deals. Goldman sold the product to its customers as a good investment. Paulson made approximately $1 billion shorting the deal while those on the other side of the trade lost about $1 billion, while never being advised of the hedge fund manager’s role. According to the late U.S. Senator Carl Levin, Goldman was itself shorting (betting on subprime derivative products to fail) while actively promoting these products to clients. Comedian Jon Stewart started calling Goldman Sachs “those f*!*!ing guys” during this period.
Equally notable was the 2012 incident when Greg Smith, a VP at Goldman, tendered his resignation after 12 years with the firm on the OpEd pages of the New York Times. Smith lamented on “how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets,’ ” Smith wrote. The “muppets” characterization instantly went viral with comedic internet memes, like this catchy musical video written by former Wall Street veteran and law professor Frank Partnoy.
More recently, Goldman Sachs has upped its game to criminal felony charges leveled by the U.S. Department of Justice in the 1MDB bribery case. The Justice Department released this statement on October 22, 2020 in conjunction with bringing the charges against Goldman Sachs:
“Over a period of five years, Goldman Sachs participated in a sweeping international corruption scheme, conspiring to avail itself of more than $1.6 billion in bribes to multiple high-level government officials across several countries so that the company could reap hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, all to the detriment of the people of Malaysia and the reputation of American financial institutions operating abroad. Today’s resolution, which includes a criminal guilty plea by Goldman Sachs’ subsidiary in Malaysia, demonstrates that the department will hold accountable any institution that violates U.S. law anywhere in the world by unfairly tilting the scales through corrupt practices.”
The message here is simple, if you’re a company with a good reputation, you need to do a proper and thorough amount of due diligence before you align your name and reputation with another company.
