Goldman Sachs agreed on Thursday to pay a lower-than-expected $550m fine to settle US regulators’ accusations that it misled investors in a mortgage-backed security – a move that ends the highest profile regulatory case since the crisis.
Although the penalty is the biggest levied on a Wall Street bank, it amounts to around a week’s worth of trading revenues for Goldman and is below the $1bn fraud the Securities and Exchange Commission had alleged in its complaint in April.
Goldman also succeeded in persuading regulators to move the settlement away from civil fraud accusations to focus on its admission that the marketing materials for the collateralised debt obligation “contained incomplete information”.