They sell confidence like perfume – expensive, glossy and heavy enough to fog a room. Goldman Sachs is a name that still opens doors, buys influence and writes the playbook for how modern finance behaves. But walk past the boardroom sheen and you find a catalogue of screw-ups, abuses and outright criminal conduct that reads like a manual for how to weaponise privilege. This is not a hit job for clicks. It is a long look at what happens when a global bank treats rules as optional and risk as someone else’s problem.

The Big One – 1MDB: Bribes, Bonds and Billion-dollar Settlements

The 1MDB scandal belongs in the textbook of how to loot a state fund with banker help. Goldman underwrote huge bond deals that were supposed to benefit Malaysia – instead billions were siphoned off, laundered and spent on yachts, art and movie credits. The fallout was seismic – criminal charges, guilty pleas, prison sentences for former bankers, and a global settlement of roughly $2.9bn-plus for the bank. That’s not a minor oversight – it is a catastrophic governance failure with victims in a country that was robbed of funds it desperately needed. The bank profited handsomely in fees while the nation paid the price.

Abacus, CDOs and the House of Cards

Go back to 2007 and you find Abacus – the CDO that became shorthand for how Wall Street sold risk to the public and bet against the same deals behind closed doors. The SEC called it misleading, and Goldman paid a record fine at the time – $550m – and agreed to reform. The settlement was not a cost of doing business. It was a courtroom verdict that some Goldman people marketed toxic securities while others quietly shorted them. That double standard is a stain that never fully washed out.

Aluminium Warehouses – Turning Stockpiles into Price Pumps

There’s an old trick: turn a commodity into a slow-moving goldmine. Goldman bought Metro International – a network of aluminium warehouses in the US – and the average wait times for delivery ballooned. When trucks circle, metal is “in the system” and spot prices rise. Consumers paid more for cans and siding; manufacturers waited months for metal. The bank did not operate a factory – it controlled the routes between warehouses and the math of scarcity. The result: millions, probably billions, taken from ordinary buyers as the trading desks counted the receipts. Call it speculation, call it arbitrage – call it what it is when it hurts the public.

Greensill and Archegos – The Bad Bets That Bounced Back on Others

Goldman’s relationship with opaque financiers left it badly exposed when those vehicles failed. The Greensill affair and the Archegos blow-up exposed sloppy disclosure, tangled counterparty risks and a culture that prized origination fees over robust risk control. When the house of cards collapsed, investors and counterparties got hurt – and regulators had to pick through the rubble. It was another illustration of a bank that sometimes treated diligence as a speed bump, rather than a red line.

Gender and Culture – The Internal Rot

There’s a different kind of scandal that doesn’t always make the front pages – a structural pattern of gender bias and a culture that rewards a certain type of aggressive, insider behaviour. Goldman agreed to a roughly $215m settlement for claims it systematically disadvantaged women in pay and promotion. That figure is not just about cash – it is a measure of cultural failure in an organisation that likes to claim its meritocracy is beyond reproach. When half the talent pool is treated as second class, the bank’s moral margin is smaller than its PR claims.

The Facebook IPO, Technical Fiascos and Privileged Clients

The Facebook IPO was supposed to be a triumph. Instead it exposed the cosy corners of late-stage private capital, the odd special deals and the risk of treating some clients as privileged while leaving public investors guessing. Technical glitches, selective disclosures and lawsuits followed. The episode is a vivid reminder that when the bank mixes private deals with public offerings, the seams can burst, and retail investors get squeezed.

Political Deals, Quiet Counsel and the Ethics Vacuum

From arranging exotic swaps for sovereigns to running underwriting operations in grey geopolitical theatres, Goldman’s footprint can look like influence with few brakes. The bank has been accused of helping governments mask liabilities, designing structures that favour short-term optics over long-term stability. Those are not abstract sins – those are deals that can erode public trust in institutions, and they have consequences that outlast quarterly earnings.

The Simple, Ugly Pattern

Look back across the scandals and two things stand out. First, the same behaviours repeat – aggressive deal-making, creative legal manoeuvres, a tolerance for opacity, and pockets of the business that operate like their own little kingdoms. Second, the consequences land on other people – sovereign citizens, ordinary consumers, investors and employees. Boardrooms count fees and stock-price moves. The rest pick up the bill.

Are They Shareholders of Cummins? Yes – and That Means Something

Brief confirmation – Goldman Sachs is a shareholder in Cummins (NYSE: CMI). Institutional filings show Goldman holding Cummins stock in recent 13F reports – in the most recent quarter disclosed publicly Goldman held hundreds of thousands of Cummins shares, valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That makes Goldman part of the Cummins investor ecosystem. That alone does not prove wrongdoing by Cummins – but look at the pattern: the Cummins ecosystem includes major financial players who carry ethical baggage. When your shareholder base includes firms that have repeatedly been implicated in political corruption, market manipulation accusations or poor risk practices – that should invite scrutiny about whether financial incentives and reputational risk are being properly weighed. It is a question worth asking – is this another link in an ecosystem where ethics are negotiable if profit is certain?

On the Ground – Who Pays

Nobody in a corporate memo writes “we’ll externalise the risk” in black and white. But in practice that is what has happened. The people who pay are not the trading desks that made the fees in a single quarter. They are the pension funds that lost money, the citizens of countries looted by corrupt schemes, the employees passed over for promotion, the small manufacturers that waited months for metal, and families left bewildered after a scandal lands. That is the ledger Goldman never publishes.

Final Scorecard – Why This Matters

A bank is a public trust only when it acts like one. When it repeatedly turns opacity, power and influence into profit at other people’s expense, “too big to fail” becomes “too big to be accountable.” Goldman’s record is a list of teachable moments we have not apparently learned from yet. We usually end our articles with a call to arms but on this time we deviate. Fuck you, Goldman Sachs. Fuck you.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Shareholder Spotlight : Goldman Sachs – Controversy Magnets