Goldman Sachs

Only 40,000 lucky Berkshire Hathaway shareholders got the chance to see their hero Warren Buffett in the flesh as they made their annual pilgrimage to Omaha over the weekend for the investment firm's annual meeting.

Warren Buffett has vigorously defended Goldman Sachs against fraud allegations being levelled at the investment bank.

The FSA is today meeting senior officials from Goldman Sachs over the bank's involvement in structuring complex debt intruments during the financial crisis, Investment Week understands.

Congressional investigators yesterday accused Goldman Sachs of taking a "net short" position in the US mortgage market in 2007 that enabled it to benefit from the bursting of the housing bubble.

"You may as well praise a man for not robbing a bank."

The beleaguered Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs boasted that it was making tens of millions of dollars of profits daily by betting against its own clients' investments, according to internal emails released by a US senator.

Much of the financial media's focus this week was on Goldman Sachs, US hedge fund Paulson & Co, the SEC, and problems with complex mortgage-related instruments.

Britain's gross domestic product is expected to have expanded 0.4% in the first quarter of 2010, according to a survey of City economists.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)'s charges against Goldman Sachs lend impetus to the call for tighter banking regulation, says Cazenove's Paul Harvey.

The G20 group of rich and poor countries is likely to make rapid progress on a radical IMF plan to tax the world's financial institutions in the hope of reaching a deal by the end of the year, the chancellor, Alistair Darling, said today.