Word: risks
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...giving him a chance to prove it. The court ordered a federal judge in Georgia to hear new evidence in the case, including the fact that seven of nine key witnesses have recanted their original testimony. The ruling highlighted the Justices' divergent views on death-row appeals: "The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification" for a new hearing, wrote John Paul Stevens. "This Court has never held," dissented Antonin Scalia, "that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able...
...company when Paulson went to Treasury in July 2006, he accelerated Goldman's transformation from a firm that depended on its clients for investment-banking revenue - fees generated from advising on deals to underwriting debt and equity securities - to one whose clients are driving a resurgent trading and risk-taking business. Goldman has a tradition of taking trading risks. In the postwar era, the firm's DNA has always combined the interlocking strands represented by two of the world's foremost risk arbitrageurs - first Gus Levy and later Robert Rubin - with the investment-banker pedigree of former senior partners, including...
...derivative-driven innovations and massive leverage, Blankfein is the firm's chief advocate for taking risks but also its chief risk watchdog. He has a far different perspective from that of most of the previous Goldman bosses. In December 2006, Viniar led a meeting of senior Goldman executives to examine ongoing daily losses in the firm's mortgage portfolio. Goldman had already underwritten and sold billions of dollars' worth of mortgage-backed securities, much of it labeled investment grade by ratings agencies. It was, in fact, junk. But Goldman realized earlier than most that rot was setting in and famously...
...religion's rules against receiving interest payments. In 1984, Goldman partner and J. Aron chief Mark Winkelman put Blankfein in charge of a group of foreign-exchange salesmen and later in charge of all foreign-exchange business. Rubin, then on the firm's management committee and responsible for both risk arbitrage and J. Aron, had advised Winkelman against it. According to Charles Ellis' 2008 book about Goldman, The Partnership, Rubin told him, "We've never seen it work to put salespeople in charge of trading in other areas of the firm. Are you pretty sure of your analysis...
Blankfein's career took off. He seemed to have a sixth sense about when to push traders to take more risk and when to take their collective feet off the accelerator. "It's not about hanging on to a predisposition," Blankfein told FORTUNE in March 2008. "The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong." Blankfein too was becoming a quick adjuster...