Say this for Goldman Sachs. It is hard to go wrong following the investment bank's lead.

Okay, so maybe they bet against their customers, as we learned from the credit default swaps case brought against the firm by the SEC earlier this year.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is taking on an M&A afficionado from Goldman Sachs to replace their retiring CFO, as they prep for the next wave of growth through acquisitions.

Simon Dingemans, head of Goldman Sach’s European mergers and acquisitions franchise, will take over the finance helm at the UK pharmaceuticals powerhouse—becoming CFO-designate in January and replacing retiring CFO Julian Heslop, who will end his term in March.

Banks' arguments against stricter capital reserve requirements seem to be getting a hearing from regulators such as Tim Geithner and the Basel Committee, but a recent paper suggests they should not.

This was alluded to in a blog today by Simon Johnson over at the Baseline Scenario, but the relevant passages are worth reading.

The latest revelations  concerning the dispute between AIG and Goldman over collateral show how weak the new financial reform package really is.

After all, Goldman's demands for collateral from AIG as it was failing ended up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Yet according to the testimony today during the crisis panel's latest hearings, the whole question hinged on what constituted fair value.

The Morgan Stanley case may not go as far as the one involving Goldman. And it is way too early to know what exactly prosecutors would charge the firm with doing.

But it's possible to venture a guess based on Yves Smith's observations today at Naked Capitalism.

To follow up on Steve Taub's blog from the other day, more companies are running into resistance from shareholders to what they see as excessive executive compensation.

True, the latest rebellions are occurring in the UK, but governance practices increasingly know few boundaries, or at least find the pond not much of one.

A time-honored way for unpopular companies to burnish their image is to dole out lots of money to charity. Now it looks like the new alternative, at least for financial services businesses, is to hand out big bucks to small companies.

Just consider this.  On Wednesday, Citigroup announced the launch of a $200 million fund to boost small-business lending in low-income communities.  It linked up with Calvert Foundation, a nonprofit investment management firm,  and Opportunity Financial Network, a financial intermediary for community investments, to help with these efforts.  The deal is that Citi will provide $199 million through a mix of equity and loans. The other two organizations will supply the rest. 

This suggestion for tightening up the rules for issuing private placements would go a long way toward addressing the fundamental issue in the Goldman Sachs case.

By increasing the legal liability for fraud, underwriters would have more incentive to disclose the risks in private placements like the Abacus deal, and that would cut through all the back and forth over whether sophisticated investors have enough information to compete with those on the other end of such deals.

Either Andrew Sorkin or Warren Buffett is wrong about the due diligence that was possible for investors to undertake on the dodgy securities in the Abacus deal that are at the heart of the SEC's case against Goldman Sachs. Or perhaps both Sorkin and Buffett are wrong.

Sorkin says Buffett has no sympathy for the investors who lost money on the deal, chiefly the German bank IKB and the Dutch bank ABN Amro.

Submitted by Francine McKenna, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

I watched all 11 hours yesterday of the Goldman Sachs testimony to the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations.

I never expected anyone to mention the auditors and I was not disappointed. You may think, given my criticism of the auditors, that I would be cheering on the side of the inquisitors, ready to burn the smarty-pants, smug, supercilious Goldman "banksters" at the stake.

Well... you would be wrong.