Goldman Sachs: Some language is inappropriate for younger audiences

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Not that kids would be inclined to watch a more than seven-hour congressional hearing about collateralized debt obligations and other complex Wall Street investments, but if they did, they would have encountered some inappropriate language.

Several times throughout the hearing, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and other lawmakers referred to internal Goldman e-mails in which employees used expletives to describe some of the mortgage-backed securities they were selling.

At one point, Levin repeatedly used an expletive written in one e-mail to describe one of the securities.

“How about the fact that you sold hundreds of millions of that deal after your people said it was a [expletive] deal. Does that bother you?” Levin asked Daniel Sparks, the former head of Goldman’s mortgage department.

Levin later asked Goldman Chief Financial Officer David Viniar about the language used by employees in e-mails to describe the company’s own products.

“I think that’s very unfortunate to have on e-mail,” Viniar said. The response drew laughter from the audience, and Levin chastised Viniar for lamenting simply that the opinions were included in e-mails, rather than that employees had those views about some Goldman products.

Viniar quickly tried to clarify his response, saying it was unfortunate employees had those views, regardless of whether they were put in e-mails that later ended up in the hands of Senate investigators.

-- Jim Puzzanghera in Washington