Bank CEOs: We Screwed Up

Bank CEOs admitted on Wednesday what everyone else has known all along: They underestimated the severity of the 2008 financial crisis. When asked about one of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s most anticipated questions—why Goldman Sachs shorted securities while lobbying ratings agencies to give them high grades—Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, "I do think the behavior is improper. We regret the consequence that people have lost money in it." Also, when Blankfein was asked why Goldman Sachs didn’t take less than 100 percent in payments from AIG—an issue over which Timothy Geithner, who headed the New York Fed at the time, is taking significant fire—Blankfein said, “It didn’t come up in any conversation that I can recall.”