SuperShocker: Since the financial crisis hit, investment banks have been rightly criticized for their tendency to be more concerned with their own trading profits than the well-being of their customers. According to Bloomberg sometimes, however, an investment bank can take the whole client service thing a bit too far.
Take, for instance, the case of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and its client Solyndra LLC, the California-based solar-panel maker that filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and dismissed its 1,100 employees.
Solyndra has become infamous lately as the company that, with much political fanfare, was handed a large government loan and then went kaput. Solyndra is usually described as “politically connected” because President Barack Obama visited the company in 2010 and said that “companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.”
Also, one of the company’s major supporters was the George Kaiser Family Foundation; George Kaiser, a wealthy Oklahoma oil executive, was one of Obama’s bundlers of contributions during his successful 2008 presidential campaign. (A conservative website reported that, according to White House logs, Solyndra investors and management had made “no fewer than 20 trips” to the White House between March 2009 and April 2011).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-26/solyndra-meltdown-may-hit-goldman-s-reputation-william-d-cohan.html
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