Mike Morgan, Wall Street blogger and reportedly a registered investment advisor (whatever that means, exactly), is being sued by Goldman Sachs for running his blog site, www.Goldmansachs666.com. Goldman Sachs may simply want the domain name, but are filing a cease-and-desist order against him. Morgan’s blog is extremely critical and sometimes accusative of Goldman Sachs. While his website isn’t that great, needlessly repeating a lot of text, and posting headlines that don’t quite follow through, it does contain a whole lot of information that just adds to our dislike of GS. 

He quotes a recent article, from an economic site, which seems to assert that Goldman Sachs executives lied to Congress about the amount of bonuses it paid. Interesting that GS isn’t suing the author of that article, as far as we know.

(Today’s news focuses on Wall Street bonuses from Bank of America.)

One of the most important articles Morgan links to from his site is from Forbes.com. The full article: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0413/096-sachs-semgroup-goldman-goose-oil.html — which describes Goldman Sachs’ involvement in oil futures and its relationship with Semgroup Holdings, an oil company which sold oil and invested in oil futures, and went bankrupt in the middle of 2008. 

Remember the oil price surge which all of a sudden reversed as if it were a bad dream? (So long ago, it seems.) It drove us all crazy; all sorts of people claimed that speculators were to blame, manipulating the stock market, and then others claimed that speculators couldn’t be doing it. Well, it certainly seems like manipulation was there, for sure. And if some of it was done by GS… we’d like to know, since they practically run the US Treasury. 

It seems, from the Forbes article, that J Aron & Co., which is Goldman Sachs’ commodities trading arm, did lots of trades with Semgroup — who had bet that the price of oil would go down. But of course the price kept climbing, somehow. (No one really has a good explanation for that, do they?) Semgroup faced suddenly a margin call for amounts it couldn’t pay, and tried to get J Aron to pay them for oil that Aron had purchased from them. J Aron refused, and wanted its margin call right away. So Semgroup had to file for bankruptcy. And right afterwards… the price of oil broke and began its remarkable plunge. 

It’s looking like a duck, and sounding like a duck, and walking like a duck, and…