So there's growing evidence that Goldman Sachs, Golden Boy Bank of the last two administrations, recipient of billions in tax money to save its sorry ass, and the previous and likely future home of Obama's heaviest economic advisors, Wall Street Timmy Geithner and Lonesome Larry Summers, lied to their customers when they were hawking mortgage securities as a fine, perhaps brilliant, investment even as they secretly bet their own bucks on the failure of those securities.

Are you following this? Here: (H/T Mark)

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

Kind of hard to do with the high-level protection Goldman's getting from all those ex-GS employees staffing the White House and Treasury Dept.

This is the height of shady dealing, usually the province of fly-by-night scam artists one short step away from a very long prison term. Think anybody at Timmy & Larry's place with ever wear an orange jumpsuit?

Don't bother to answer. It's too obvious and trite to repeat.