Bernie Sanders charged Monday that a recent government settlement proves Goldman Sach’s business is “based on fraud.”
The Justice Department announced Monday that the Wall Street giant would pay over $5 billion to settle charges it sold risky mortgage investments in the lead up to the financial crisis, and didn’t tell investors enough about it.
{mosads}Sanders, who has built his presidential campaign in large part on big bank bashing, said the settlement proves his point.
“What they have just acknowledged to the whole world is that their system … is based on fraud,” he told supporters in New York.
Sanders also complained that the civil settlement did not include any criminal charges, proving the “corruption of our criminal justice system.”
Monday’s settlement addressed charges that Goldman Sachs continued to sell bonds loaded with subprime mortgages, even after internal concerns emerged about the reliability of those investments. The government claimed, and Goldman acknowledged, that the bank failed to highlight the risks in those investments before selling them off in the years leading up to the financial crisis.