Lending or Trading? That's The Question for Goldman

摘要

For Goldman Sachs's Special Situations Group, corporate disasters can be a source of some of the bank's biggest profits. Now the secretive operation, which invests in the debt and equity of troubled companies and in loans to high-risk borrowers, faces its own potential calamity. The group, known as SSG, could be put out of business by new rules in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that seek to curb proprietary trading by banks. Goldman Sachs has already shut two units that made bets with the firm's money because such trading by banks will be prohibited under the Vol-cker rule, named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker.